“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed – fading away like water on stone.”*…
Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness.” Sophie Hardach on why they died out…
Which word would you use to refer to yourself? “I”, presumably, in the singular. And how about you and a group of people? “We”, of course, in the plural.
But how about you and one other person?
In modern English, there is no word for that. You would probably just use “we” or “the two of us”.
But more than 1,000 years ago, you would have said: “wit”.
This term, once also used affectionately to describe the closeness between two people, is one of many personal pronouns that have been lost or transformed amid huge social and political change over the centuries. The English language has become simplified – but at times this has left gaps, creating confusion.
“Wit” means “we two” in Old English, a Germanic language spoken in England until about the 12th Century, which evolved into the English we speak today. Now completely lost, “wit” was part of an extinct group of pronouns used for exactly two people: the dual form, which also includes “uncer” or “unker” (“our” for two people) and “git” (“you two”). That dual form vanished from the English language around the 13th Century. (You can hear how some of these were pronounced in the short clips later in this article.)
“There’s a whole history in the [personal] pronouns”, including the impact of Viking and Norman invasions on the English language alongside shifting norms and customs that have changed how we talk, says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.
Many Old English pronouns are still in use, says Birkett. Our oldest English personal pronouns include “he” and “it”, as well as “we”, “us”, “our”, “me” and “mine”, Birkett says. They have made it through more than 1,000 years of history and upheaval, almost intact.
“‘He’ definitely is a very old English form, and also ‘hit’, which lost the ‘h’ and became ‘it’,” Birkett says. The Old English “Ic” has also been resilient, losing only one letter, to become the modern English “I”.
But other pronouns were cast off – such as the once-common dual form. “It’s fairly widespread in Old English texts. Particularly in poetry, we get the use of ‘wit’ and ‘unc’ for ‘us two, the two of us’,” says Birkett…
Fascinating- read on: “Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy.”
* Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words
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As we choose our words, we might recall that it was on this date in 1828 that Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language. Published in two quarto volumes, it contained 70,000 entries, as against the high of 58,000 of any previous dictionary. Webster, who was 70 at the time, had published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, and had begun then the campaign of language reform (motivated by both nationalistic and philological concerns) that initiated the formal shift of American English spelling (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.). His 1828 dictionary cemented those changes, and continued his efforts to include technical and scientific (not just literary) terms.
“A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.”*…
Developing countries around the world are deeply in hock. According to UNCTAD (UN Trade and Development), global public debt reached a record high of $102 trillion in 2024. Although public debt in developing countries accounted for less than one third of the total – $31 trillion – it has grown twice as fast as in developed economies since 2010. Those developing nations had debt service on that external public debt of $487 billion in 2023– which meant, for half of them, paying at least 6.5% of export revenues to service external public debt. More practically, that means that 3.4 billion people are living in countries that spend more on interest than on healthcare or education. [See the UNCTAD fact sheet here.]
Not surprisingly, developing countries sometimes fall sufficiently behind to call their loans into question. When that happens, an under-the-radar “informal group” of creditors– the Paris Club– gets together to negotiate a way forward…
The Paris Club is an informal group of official creditors whose role is to find coordinated and sustainable solutions to the payment difficulties experienced by debtor countries. As debtor countries undertake reforms to stabilize and restore their macroeconomic and financial situation, Paris Club creditors provide an appropriate debt treatment. Paris Club creditors provide debt treatments to debtor countries in the form of rescheduling, which is debt relief by postponement or, in the case of concessional rescheduling, reduction in debt service obligations during a defined period (flow treatment) or as of a set date (stock treatment).
The origin of the Paris Club dates back to 1956 when Argentina agreed to meet its public creditors in Paris. Since then, the Paris Club has reached 484 agreements with 102 different debtor countries. Since 1956, the debt treated in the framework of Paris Club agreements amounts to $616 billion.
The 22 members of the Paris Club are mostly the larger OECD members, plus Russia. South Africa is a prospective member, and China and India are Ad Hoc members. Organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the OECD are “observers.” Participants representing members are government officials. The U.S., for instance is represented by a State Department official (relying on positions formulated by the Treasury Department).
Sven van Mourik puts all of this into context…
In today’s world, finance is dominated not by states, but by private actors. The market capitalization of a company like Apple in December 2023 reached $3 trillion, exceeding the combined GDP of at least 140 countries. Last year, global private financial assets reached a record $291 trillion, of which some 50 percent is concentrated in North America. By contrast, the world’s nations together owed a global public debt of a record $102 trillion in 2024, of which so-called “developing” countries owe $31 trillion. While there’s a playbook for private debt and corporate bankruptcy, it’s a different story for the official debt owed by nation states. What happens when a state can no longer repay its foreign creditors?
Following a deep global debt crisis in the early 1980s, the world’s poorest states struggled to service impossible debts to foreign capital, leading to widespread revolts and humanitarian crises across the formerly colonized, developing countries of the Global South. Following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the burden of this public debt is once again immense…
[van Mourik reviews some of the startling statistics cited above…]
… It is puzzling to see states prioritize the servicing of foreign debt, even when it directly harms their populations. Why not default? Experts at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, D.C. claim that “there is no alternative” to what has become an ossified response to sovereign debt crises: cut the government budget, facilitate the private sector and grow your economy to repay your foreign debt. But what about when a state, fully cooperative with the policy measures prescribed by these institutions, still cannot repay its debts?
As a financial historian, this question led me to investigate a creditor that routinely takes center stage as countries attempt to navigate sovereign default, an institution so secretive that it has largely escaped the public eye. The Paris Club, an informal forum of representatives from creditor countries largely in the Global North, has steered the destinies of nations in financial peril, restructuring over half a trillion dollars in sovereign debt since its first meeting in 1956. Without its approval, countries face default and can effectively be prevented from accessing long- and short-term trade credit — credit that facilitates the uninterrupted flow of goods across borders, and can be compared to a country’s life blood. Without it, states are unable to access vital imports like food, fuel and medicine.
The Paris Club convenes to set up a new payment schedule for a country at risk of defaulting on its “official” debt owed to other countries. It is unique in that despite its pivotal role, it remains an informal institution. It comprises 22 major creditor countries, including the United States, Germany and France, and occasional ad hoc participants like India and China, which together coordinate reduced or rescheduled debt payments for a country facing default.
The Paris Club itself doesn’t lend new money. Instead, it “treats” a country’s debt payment schedule, either through rescheduling interest payments or, since the late 1980s, by offering the poorest countries a “haircut” and partially restructuring the debt. In its 70-year history, including the recent Debt Service Suspension Initiative, the Paris Club has treated a total of $863 billion of debt for 102 countries through 543 agreements; this amounts to around two-thirds of the world’s sovereign debt restructurings through 2010. A staggering legacy for a group that lacks any public oversight. With some pride, former chairmen of the Paris Club’s secretariat have called the Club a “non-institution” and “totally discreet if not secretive.”…
[van Mourik unpacks the operations of the Club and explains its symbiotic relationship with the IMF and its “structural adjustment” programs– AKA “austerity,” the reduction of debtor government expenses, often on social welfare, education, and healthcare (and often to painful effect)
… While the Paris Club rescheduled debt payments, the IMF designed programs that served to optimize a country’s ability to pay back interest and principal; the arrangement has over the years evolved into a debt restructuring routine in which debtor countries have little say.
The IMF today remains an institution in which the countries of the Global North have nine times more voting power than the countries of the Global South, as voting rights are tied to economic weight. In the Paris Club, a similar power differential is reflected in the spatial and temporal arrangement of the procedures, which borders on the theatrical. A debtor country’s delegation only ever confronts its creditors alone and is required to leave the room when they deliberate to set the terms of a deal…
[van Mourik explores the consequences of these deals, concluding…]
… creditor-dominated organizations like the IMF and the Paris Club allow rich countries to remain at the helm of a sinking ship. After all, as economist Daniel Munevar concluded following the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing within our current framework of debt servicing would “sound the death knell” for the world’s climate ambitions, as it prevents debtor countries from implementing the costly policies needed to meet ambitious climate targets. Others conclude that a serious degrowth strategy, one that prioritized ecological sustainability and social well-being over growth for its own sake, would require the countries of the Global South to default.
Various formations of countries across the Global South have proposed debt restructuring regimes, like the UN Framework Convention on Debt, that would “improve the fairness and transparency of debt resolution mechanisms.” Gabor, the economist, has called this new UN framework “a bid to wrest deliberative control away from the closed-door clubs where Northern financial might prevails.”The question is under what circumstances such strategies might be successful. Despite the Paris Club’s inclusion of non-Western members like Korea and Brazil, or the IMF and the Paris Club’s recent collaboration with China and the G20, the deck remains stacked against low-income borrowing countries, who “have little voice in any of these fora.”
The deeper challenge for all states is to reform a global financial architecture that evolved based on the interests of a handful of Western creditor states, at the cost of austerity and social destruction elsewhere. Debtor countries that wish to retain access to global markets — even for the most vital imports — must participate, and service their debt within regulatory frameworks over which they have no control and which have proven to be defective…
Who really controls international debt? “The Quiet Powerbroker,” from @thedialmag.bsky.social.
All this said, it’s important to note that in fact an alternative is emerging, but not one that’s in the spirit of the UN Framework. Even before the Trump Administration took the U.S. off the field, China had become the world’s largest development lender.
“How China Lends: A Rare Look into 100 Debt Contracts with Foreign Governments“:
We collect and analyze 100 contracts between Chinese state-owned entities and government borrowers in 24 developing countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Oceania, and compare them with those of other bilateral, multilateral, and commercial creditors. Three main insights emerge. First, the Chinese contracts contain unusual confidentiality clauses that bar borrowers from revealing the terms or even the existence of the debt. Second, Chinese lenders seek advantage over other creditors, using collateral arrangements such as lender-controlled revenue accounts and promises to keep the debt out of collective restructuring (“no Paris Club” clauses). Third, cancellation, acceleration, and stabilization clauses in Chinese contracts potentially allow the lenders to influence debtors’ domestic and foreign policies. Even if these terms were unenforceable in court, the mix of confidentiality, seniority, and policy influence could limit the sovereign debtor’s crisis management options and complicate debt renegotiation. Overall, the contracts use creative design to manage credit risks and overcome enforcement hurdles, presenting China as a muscular and commercially-savvy lender to the developing world.
For a fascinating and illuminating on-the-ground consideration of these issues, see/hear Mary Kay Magistad‘s On China’s New Silk Road.
* Victor Hugo
###
As we redesign debt, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Jean-Jacques Laffont; he was born on this date in 1947. An economist, he made pioneering contributions in public economics, development economics, and the theory of imperfect information, incentives, and regulation. Over the course of his career, he wrote 17 books and more than 200 articles. His 1993 book A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation, written with Jean Tirole, is a fundamental reference in the economics of the public sector and the theory of regulation. Laffont died in 2004; had he lived, he might well have shared the 2014 Nobel Prize for Economics awarded to his colleague and collaborator Jean Tirole for the work they did together.
He was uninvolved in the Paris Club; indeed, his last book, Regulation and Development, discussed policies for improving the economies of less developed countries in ways more consistent with the UN’s new framework than the IMF’s old-but-still-dominant playbook.
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”*…
A housekeeping note: (R)D will be off tomorrow– Sunday the 12th– returning on Monday…
Wikipedia has over 300 language editions. Each one picks different images to illustrate the same topic.
From Riley Walz, a marvelous way to explore the the images that different concepts conjure in different cultures: “In Every Language.”
(Image above: “Mother” in English, Portuguese, and others on the left; Italian, Esperanto, and others on the right)
* E. M. Forster
###
As we visualize, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that Frank Sinatra recorded “Strangers in the Night.” According to Sinatra: The Life (Summers, Swan, 2006), Sinatra despised the song and called it “a piece of sh*t” and, per Frank Sinatra by Jean-Pierre Hombach, “worst f*cking song that I have ever heard.” Nevertheless, it became his first No. 1 hit since 1955’s “Learning the Blues” and remained on the Billboard charts for 15 weeks. His album of the same name became his most successful. The song also won him Grammy Awards for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Record of the Year, and Best Arrangement.
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information”*…
From yesterday’s post on the possible (and promising, but also potentially painful) future of computing to a pressing predicament we face today. The estimable Anil Dash on the threats to the open web…
You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.
It’s not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for “open” as we’ve known it on the Internet over the last few decades.
The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.
Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what’s still open, and likely won’t rest until they’ve either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don’t say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is…
[Dash details the treats– largely, but not entirely driven by AI and its purveyors. He concludes…]
… The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there’s no fortune or fame in it.
Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it’s the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who’ve survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they’re trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
So, we’re in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we’re all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we’re being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.
At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don’t think it’s any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.
Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member.) That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words! These are the people whom I’ve seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web’s defenders. [Further full disclosure: so is your correpondent, and so have I.]
Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site’s members without reciprocating in kind.
The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can’t just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying “enough”. And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick’s recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be… AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who’s read everything I’ve shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.
But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don’t think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called “good AI“. It’s going to take better policy, which may be impossible in the short term at the federal level in the U.S., but can certainly happen at more local levels and in the rest of the world. Though I’m skeptical about putting too much of the burden on individual users, we can certainly change culture and educate people so that more people feel empowered and motivated to choose alternatives to the big tech and big AI platforms that got us into this situation. And we can encourage harm reduction approaches for the people and institutions that are already locked into using these tools, because as we’ve seen, even small individual actions can get institutions to change course.
Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time…
Unless we act, it’s “Endgame for the Open Web,” from @anildash.com. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Tim Berners-Lee… who should know.
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As we protect what’s precious, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to a man whose work helped lay the foundation for both the promise and the peril unpacked in the article linked above above: J. Presper Eckert; he was born on this day in 1919. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.
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