John Vechey

In continuing to speak with people on the island, the glaring unmet need is for an island-wide event calendar. I also bear witness to a very strong desire to rid ourselves of corporate social media, with multiple people I’ve spoken to already taking steps.

Here’s an exploration of what exists in this realm, and how the off-the-shelf event/calendar ActivityPub enabled open source projects stack up to the island needs.

Friendica is one of the more popular ActivityPub applications. In essence it’s a Facebook.com alternative that prizes itself on also being a bridge to and from other social networks. It would probably be one of the most understandable to onboard people onto because it would be the most recognizable. A negative is that it’s a bit overwhelming because it can do so much stuff.

At this point I believe Gancio powering the calendar would be a good choice as it offers the simplest execution of the biggest need. That said, it’s insufficient in and of itself as a community social media solution.

I think pairing Gancio with another ActivityPub enabled solution would be the trick. That could be a microblogging option like Mastodon or Pleroma, Gancio combined with Friendica or any number of other potential applications in the Fediverse.

There’s also loads of other considerations at play, such as what language the services are written in, what application clients exist, how committed the teams are, etc. Additionally, while the island community uses a LOT of Facebook and Instagram, there’s way fewer people interested in Twitter style microblogging. So all this is a very surface level exploration.

One note, integrations between ActivityPub enabled services either directly on the back end, or just using the power of ActivityPub!

Feature Idea It’s lonely and off putting to sign into things and have to immediately find people. Since people are signing into a community social network, every account ought to be seeded with people to follow, probably organizations. You could also have a few “ambassadors” in the community who would be seeds for people signing on.

editors note It’s taken me the whole post to figure out how to consistently spell calendar. Embarrassing.

If events, announcements, and photos are the main pieces to Orcas.Social’s community society media, then it’s vital to spend some time on the values and principals they will be implemented.

My work history is in part making video games as a cofounder of PopCap Games. Our goals were to make fun games that everyone can enjoy. Our (very) general process was find game mechanics that we found fun and compelling, and then work very hard to make that accessible to everyone.

A lot of that second step came from removing things that made it less fun and less compelling. Easing people into the games, removing things that made the games more complicated, watching people play and learning from what they did, as well as listening to feedback.

There’s aspects to the implementation of community social media that line up 100% with that design approach.

• Create the core functionality to drive events, announcements, and photos
• Make it so that was approachable and usable for everyone in the community

Using social media isn’t a solitary experience, it’s a communal and shared experience. If we just focused on ease of use and feature implementation, we would miss a huge aspect of social media’s ills around safety and comfort.

Fediverse applications are no different. A lot of black people report experiencing micro and macro aggression within Mastodon communities. Requested tools that can increase safety for women and gender non-binary individuals don’t make it into Mastodon, even ones that are designed and coded and merely need to be pulled into the project.

So when we talk about “how” we will do this, we need to include women, black, native, LGBTQ+ voices, those differently abled, really anyone that’s currently marginalized by society as a whole, and get their input and design on a fundamental level.

As a white, cis-gendered guy, especially one who is currently wealthy, I don’t have the same threats to my emotional, physical, and material safety. I could look at a community social media implementation and would have huge misses.

This inclusion doesn’t happen from a few conversations, but true intersectional inclusion in the process from start to finish. This will change what tools we use, who works on it, how we approach design, and it will change whole swathes of features. Without intersectional inclusion we are just repeating the problems of technology and creating another top-down piece of technology that serves the current social order while it increases violence and alienation.

This is the start of an overview of how community social media could be set up. This isn’t implying that everything is the right answer, a lot of that will happen via design and implementation, but can be used as the start of a high level overview.

I believe the best implementation of community social media is in discreet and definable communities, with lots of overlapping relationships, and I am on Orcas Island (population 7k), I’m using Orcas.Social as the placeholder URL. It’s clear, clean, and easy to remember. As time goes on different branding / defined community may make more sense.

The Homepage

The homepage will be the first interaction most people will have, so it’s key that it bears in mind execution risks for adoption. This means it’s key that it delivers value from the very beginning.

The homepage goals are:

1. Provide immediate value without requiring account to community members, organizations, businesses and tourists.
2. Provide increased value to those logged in with an account
3. Lead in to onboard people into creating an account

We have a good sense for the needs from the early community conversations. This informs the content on the homepage.

It’s also worth noting that this content will be filtered and curated to maximize value and minimize noise. There will also be some quick filter links to quickly get to needed information, like school, kid-friendly, 21+ and over, free and open to the public, etc.

Events: These are pulled from (and link back to) a community calendar.

Announcements: A feed of important announcements or information. You could envision information about power outtages, unusual openings or closings, etc.

Photos: We want to set the stage for Orcas.Social to be a place to experience awe, beauty and friendliness this island has to offer.

Account: We do want to make sure people see that they can log in for a more customized experience. The account creation on boarding will be so vital, and so recognizing that the homepage will be a key part of the first step.

Imagine going to Orcas.Social to see what you could do with the kids on Saturday. Because it collects events from a lot of sources, you able to easily see that roller skating was cancelled, but see that there’s an all ages concert at OddFellows and a screening of the latest animated movie. Two of your favorite restaurants are closed but you see there’s a food truck popup at Con’s. You and your family decide to check out the concert, grab some food at the pop-up, and then decide whether to go back to the all-ages concert or watch the movie!

Vicky Osterweil over at anarchist writing group CAW wrote one of the best overviews of fascism in tech. Entitled The Silicon Reich (Part One) she dives into all the ways that tech hasn’t just switched to align with fascism out of profit or self preservation, but in fact has been one of the largest driving forces for humanity’s drive towards fascism.

One thing that makes it so powerful is that there’s nothing new or surprising, it’s just all laid out together, across different technology companies. It’s well sourced and linked, and I highly recommend giving it a read.

It’s easy to think of computing technology as politically neutral or benign, but it’s not. It’s really hard to see it as it is, a more destructive force of humanity. The pain and violence from technology is so abstracted we are barely able to acknowledge it, much less do take clear and present action.

Take “AI” for example.

If you say the phrase “I created this image by using AI” and then share some neat or funny picture, it feels like saying “Look what I created.” But if you break it down into pieces, it becomes much darker.

“I propped up a silicon valley ponzi scheme by burning down a cedar tree and stealing hundreds of gallons of water from a community so I could conveniently plagiarize and steal the creative work of others, passing it off as something I did, versus something I stole.”

That’s right out of the fascist playbook. Join team fascism and your life will become more convenient and better, all you have to do is join in the oppression of others while ignoring your own, ever increasing, cognitive dissonance.

Think about that next time you create an image using gen AI.

All this is partly why I believe must start recognizing the moral, societal, and environmental cost of our technology choices, and have to urgently move to community based social media solutions and open source tools that are created in community to help people, not just grow shareholder profit.

In talking with people in the Orcas community about their online needs over the past week, there’s a few general trends that come up.

Facebook is the #1 corporate social media network in use here, followed by Instagram. I’ve even see people add each other on Instagram in lieu of exchanging numbers.

While many have a desire to be away from Facebook and corporate social media few see any solutions or potential paths to get out. Almost everyone says that social media is hurting our community. Many people only have accounts because they’re required to be connected to the community.

The main uses on the island corporate social media are buy sell trade, getting updates and news about businesses, events, and groups.

There’s also a huge unmet need on the island for some kind of island-wide event calendar. There’s loads of calendars and information about events in hundreds of different places, some of which are out of date, most of which don’t easily come up in search.

There’s also non-profit, business and local government use of corporate social media which I’ll tackle in another post.

People’s biggest worries about getting off corporate social media are mainly around “having and managing yet another thing.” Diving deeper, some say the hurdle is learning a new thing, others complain about multiple accounts, and many indicate just having to keep another app in their minds feels like a lot.

When pressed, nearly everyone I speak to would be willing to try something new if they really felt it could offer an alternative from corporate social media, assuming enough other people were using it to bring value.

Note: A gap in my exploration so far is that I haven’t sat down with under-threat individuals within the LGBTQ+, people of color or immigrant communities to speak about their specific social media experiences. It’s also worth noting that understanding what types of local issues or harassment may occur online locally for women is also important. Having these conversations explicitly, including the inclusion of people from these groups in any kind of steering committee, would be vital before any serious tool selection or product design began.

The comment below provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the challenges around execution of community social media, namely individuals and community’s resistance to such a change.

[@johnnydegrowth](https://micro.blog/johnnydegrowth) I am more than a little in favor of community media, which is why I'd like to briefly describe what I feel is missing from the Key Steps

Resistance: (1) Active, there may be some from established interests, but it is the least important, (2) Passive, there may be a tendency by some to turn-off immediately when any discussion of new media or new networks comes up, and (3) Invisible, which is the switching cost of changing from the familiar and locked-in to something new and uncertain.

Active Resistance This is represented by those people who are so attached to the current corporate platforms that they actively work to thwart the implementation of community social media. The two main types of people I could see doing this behavior would be those with large following on corporate social media and those with moderation power within communities. In both cases it stems from fear, and since the power of community social media is that it’s within a small community, based approached directly with the people in question. That doesn’t mean you’ll convince everyone, but a walk and conversation can carry huge weight.

Passive Resistance where people are either turned off by something new, or so against social media in general that they work against adoption. In both of these cases I believe that education (here’s how corporate social media hurts our community) combined with critical mass of adoption. Most people don’t have time, desire, or energy for “yet-another-social-media”. If you recall most people left Friendster for MySpace, and then MySpace for FB. In both cases it took other people’s adoption to get them over the curve.

Invisible Resistance will come from it just being hard to do new things. Facebook, at this point, is comfortable. Not everyone likes the Microblogging format of Twitter/X/Bluesky. I’ve been trying to get more people using Signal and some people really don’t want to download a new communications application, and that will only be amplified by social media.

It’s worth framing the areas of resistance by looking at the technology adoption curve. I believe that passive and invisible resistance aren’t based on inherent personas, but more of where people will fall on the adoption curve.

There’s a cadre of people on the island who are already exploring non-corporate social media like Mastodon and Pixelfed. Those people will provide the initial adoption, testing, feedback, etc. They already see the need for this to succeed and are motivated to work through challenges. They are the innovators on the curve and will in essence help design the minimum viable experience.

Key to the strategy are having the next cohort, the early adopters, be ones who are capable and committed to seeding content. These are people that will want to know it’s stable and working. They’re fine if it’s a bit clunky to get on, as long as they can see how their core individual or organizational needs are met, they’ll give it a go. I don’t believe the early adopters will involve some magical adoption, but instead stem from highlighting the need, showing the solution, and making the ask to give it a go to see the content.

Where you’ll start to see more of the resistance will be in the later cohorts, but I believe it goes down dramatically if you’re in front of people at the right time, with the right offering, for what type of adopter they are.

A good way to think about the technology adoption curve is a series of gates. Don’t try to jump ahead to mass adoption if you don’t have the fundamentals down, and you’ll know you have the fundamentals down when the previous cohort is actively using and receiving value from it.

Don’t try to get the anti-technology person who is begrungingly on social media to be an early adopter, make sure the whole value chain is there and their core experience on corporate media is replaceable before making the ask. Don’t put up posters around town with QR codes pointing them to the sign up when it’s barely off the ground.

Being mindful of where people are at and meeting them there will be vital.

The mission is to remove our community’s dependance on corporate social media.

We will do so by approaching the problem not as a technology, design or individual issue, but as a public health issue.

The key steps are:

• Measure the issue
• Awareness of the issue
• Understanding the need
• Identify initial solutions
• Create initial solutions
• Populate initial solutions
• Promote initial solutions
• Refine and iterate

Awareness of the issue: Highlighting the issues with corporate social media that are effecting our community. Right now many people have a vague unease about social media and will articulate it, but the extent and scope is often not fully grasped. Additionally, any idea that there are possible solutions, or that solutions could be effective, is far from people’s thoughts. Most of my blog posts are focused on this issue, even if I acknowledge reading dozens of blog posts isn’t going to be the best way to communicate this to most people.

Understand the needs: Lean on lean product development techniques and start with understanding the needs. Of the snapshot of islanders in our community, why are they using corporate social media within our community? What value are they getting? What would they need from a community solution? It’s also worth noting that community social media can provide solutions that corporate social media isn’t, and that we need to look beyond just “what people’s current usage is” and look deeply into what value we can create for the community.

identify initial solutions: Once the community’s needs from social media are understood, the next step is taking a look at open source solutions already there. Here’s a list of Fediverse projects that are a good starting place. It’s important to note that we’re not trying to meet all needs, just ones that we can at the beginning.

Create initial solutions: Then once you feel like you have an initial set of solutions you can implement, do so in a way that meets the greatest needs for the least amount of work. This is an important practice in lean product development as it’s easy to spend a heckuva lot of time on solutions that you think will solve needs but will have various hurdles that make it challenging and won’t do the job. So it’s important to get things out there, test and learn!

Populate initial solutions: Once you know you have a solution to meet people’s needs, then the next step for community solutions to be successful is populate the networks. Social media is only as strong as the people on it. For community social networks to succeed they have to feel and be alive. It’s not enough to “build it and they will come.”

Promote initial solutions: Once you have confidence that your initial solutions are working, and utilizing all the owrk from above, there’s a critical mass of individuals, businesses, and organizations that can help promote it because they see the problem, have their own needs, we’ve created solutions that will work for them, and they’re part of the initial population. At this point it’s a community effort to promote it.

Refine and iterate: The last step is refine, iterate, improve, and add on. That may be an easier sign up, more services, etc. Maybe a new Fediverse technology pops up that is even better. Maybe we were successful about a community calendar but not about photo sharing, etc.

A quick walk through example for these steps:

We create a survey and get a critical mass of organizations and individuals to fill it out. We see that the vast majority of people are unhappy with social media, and many only use corporate social media for events and buy/sell/trade. We then turn that into a presentation, sharing that with representatives from key groups on the island like the chamber of commerce, school admin/teachers, doctors, small business, and a few non profits. In this presentation we share the strategy and ask for their commitment to help.

From there we create a product needs map that highlights the biggest area of needs from the survey. We find that events, announcements and buy sell trade are the biggest thing keeping people who only use it locally. We also find that for those who use it beyond the community, photo sharing is their biggest use. We also learn that the two things stopping people from moving on are managing yet-another-account and worry no one will be on it.

Diving into the current Fediverse/ActivityPub solutions, we identify open source projects that we can leverage to meet all the needs. One of our biggest hurdles is making sure we have just one authentication account for anything we implement, but we figure that out. We decide to focus on events, announcements, and buy sell trade first. Since OrcasHub already exists, we work with the creator to implement activity pub, and then create a simple events and announcements feed with an app, web site, and web widget tool.

We work with the main organizations that run / use events and create a calendar page. The public school team is already stretched thin, so we get permission to post everything ourselves. The chamber agrees to organize small businesses, and the major event facilities like the movie theater, farmers market, and all commit to posting content for a year. We

We also create a webpage view at a new site OrcasCalander.com.

We ask the above to start linking to and promoting this, including getting a kiosk view to put up at physical locations, print out the weekly events with QR codes and post them around town every week, etc.

Then we see what causes friction, and iterate from there. Once we feel that’s covered, we take a look at other areas, like photo sharing.

As I’ve mentioned, I think corporate social media is knowingly hurting society due to its incessant need for growth. I believe the Fediverse, the collection of applications built on ActivityPub, provide the start for solutions.

The core question with social networks though isn’t the features or quality of the code, but who is on and using it. A social network is only as good as the people using it. Called the network effect, it’s the inherent value that exists within social relationships. The more people are on the network the more valuable it is. The inverse is also true. The fewer on the network, the less valuable it is.

Modern social networks grew by optimizing the ease at which people could get on the network and connected to people with features that would drive initial stickiness and engagement. Then once they had momentum, would implement features to drive even more repeat engagement. They prioritized features that give little dopamine hits that make people keep coming back and keep scrolling. Their number one goal isn’t value but addiction.

Any features or value that they bring to you is an incidental byproduct on their path to addicting you to their product. They take your engagement and build an online profile of you, track you across every digital thing you do, and use that to sell and market products to you. Their goal is serve their customers needs and you are not their customer. You (and your data) are the product they are selling to their true customers: advertisers.

You may rightly point out that they do bring value. They allow you to share photos, thoughts, and links. They provide information about businesses, allow groups to connect, communicate, and share events. For each person and community they provide different amounts of value, sometimes keeping people engagement for just a small part of the feature set.

For example, on Orcas Island, almost everyone uses Facebook because that’s the only way to connect to important groups like the Orcas Buy/Sell/Trade, the only way to trade ferry reservations, the fastest way to get the latest island news, and see events.

This is what we need to provide for ourselves, off of corporate social networks.

Our purpose in this work will be to live better, healthier and more connected lives with stronger relationships to each other.

Our goal will be to remove our dependence on corporate social media.

We will take a community approach by looking at the dependence as a public health problem.

–We will look at the key needs of the community and then provide open source, locally operated solutions. –Then we will partner with key island stakeholders to provide initial content and adoption, creating “life” if you will –We will then create a community onboarding plan, helping different groups onboard each other

A key perspective is that this isn’t a technical solution, it’s one based on community and relationships. Most everyone I speak with acknowledges the problem of corporate social media but doesn’t know what to do, and can’t individually move people there.

An example of a need is an island-wide event calendar, and working with specific groups to use a community-owned standard. About making sure that important places like the school, chamber, etc are putting events in it, giving them access to posting that, and having them point to that calendar. When it’s challenging for a particular stakeholder to do so, provide technical or manual solutions to solving it.

It’s okay if someone has to manually copy a Google calendar to this new system to start. It’s okay to make a specific ask of a specific person to help this initiative. There’s only 7,000 full time residents on the island and maybe 30k in the county. We can work together and help each other get off corporate social media.

It’s fundamental that this isn’t a technology problem, but a community problem, with community solutions. And the end result will be us taking our community’s health into our own hands and providing solutions together.

Corporate social media is hurting us, but it’s intertwined with so much of our lives. It’s not clear there’s another option, and when one “goes down” another, more addictive and equally destructive, pops up. Often times the new ones, like Bluesky or TikTok, appear better, but they will always get more and more destructive. They have a structural needs to grow users and revenue due to the fact they’re beholden to shareholders and advertisers.

Alternatives exist. Thanks to the open standard ActivityPub, and often refereed to being connected to the Fediverse. There’s all kinds of decentralized social networks to accomplish a variety of tasks. Though many are newer, they have the advantage of being able to run in small servers, customized to a community’s needs, and are almost all open source. The key power of ActivityPub means they’re all interoperable, so that even if you use a small private server, you can see and interact with others on different applications.

An example is Mastodon. There’s thousands of public and private servers out there. I’m on Mastodon.ie run out of Ireland. I follow hundreds of people throughout the world almost all using different versions. While there is a Mastodon application, I use a different one called Ivory. If I want to take my Mastodon account to a different instance, I can.

All kinds of Fediverse applications are built on ActivityPub. The most popular is Mastodon, which is a Twitter/X/Bluesky microblogging service. There’s Lemmy, which is meant to function like Reddit. PixelFed, which has a Instragram like focus on photos. Loops for TikTok. PeerTube for YouTube In addition to these sets of features, applications built using AcitivyPub are also interoperable. Imagine if Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter all shared feeds.

ActivityPub alternatives have challenges like limited adoption, can be intimidating, and have a high adoption for the average person. There are hundreds of people working on solving these problems from a design and technical standpoint. Which is great. They’ll only get better, more fully functioning, as time and adoption grows.

Corporate social media is very sticky. They’re excellent at getting you on their service, and even better at keeping you there. They spend billions of dollars to try and keep you addicted, even at the expense of your and your communities health. They seem they have a near invincible hold on attention and our society.

The good news is history is rife with dead social networks. MySpace, Friendster, and soon Twitter all seemed like they had huge holds. But as fast as alternatives gained viral adoption, these dead networks slowly disappeared into irrelevance. That means that even if Facebook seems invincible, it is very much built with clay feet.

Instead of trying to compete head to head with corporate social media on the areas they spend billions, leverage what is unique and powerful about Fediverse applications, take ActivityPub’s advantage of small scale, the customizability of the open source software, and build locally for small communities.

**We can de-viral corporate social media **from our lives by approaching it not as a technology or design problem, but as a public health problem. Almost everyone acknowledges a bunch of the ills of social media, we need to help engage in conversation with them on the full harms, understand their needs, make sure alternatives can meet those needs, and onboard them to the alternatives. We can onboard people one at a time, iterate on the product offering, and slowly get people off corporate social networks.

I live on a smallish island of 7,000 full time residents that balloons to above 20,000 in the summer. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are all interwoven into the fabric of our community. But they don’t have to be. They’re hurting our community, and we can stop them together.

Most Quakers spend their time sitting in silence, listening for the spirit to move them. Sometimes in meeting their compelled to share and they do so. They’re almost always compelled to reflect and try to discern the right path. Some Quakers are Christians. Some agnostics. There’s even a healthy contingent of atheist Quakers.

There is no Quaker dogma, but one consistent trend you’ll find with the Quakers is a deep call to action. While never perfect, they’ve been one of the few organized religions consistently on the right side of history. In the 1770s most Quaker meetings made slave-owning grounds to remove people from membership. They had women leaders in the ministry before any other group in both the United States and England and were deeply connected to the women’s rights movement. They have been consistently against war for the mere sake that violence begets more violence.

I was part of the Seattle Quaker meeting when they wrote an official repudiation for the 15th century papal bull known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This document is the foundation for property law in most of the world and was used as legal justification for the genocide and land theft of indigenous and non-Christians everywhere.

One thing that makes Quakers particularly called to action is the belief that the spirit is within all of us. Part of sitting in silence is to listen to that part of ourselves. This is why there’s no doctrine, and why if you ask a thousand Quakers what they belief you’ll get a thousand different answers.

What you will find consistent is the belief that one’s actions, how one shows up in the world, is much more important than one’s words. That to know the measure of a person, is not to look at what they say, look at what they do.

This is why it’s important to look at the large tech companies and what they have done, and are doing right now.

We know from our own lived experiences their products are addictive. We know their algorithms are meant to further the addiction, even at the expense of our own mental health. We know they track us over the internet, building an ever greater advertising and propaganda machine.

When instagram “accidentally” stops allowing searches for #Democrats. When Facebook and Instagram change their policies to allow hate speech that leads directly to violence against some of the most vulnerable in our society. Over the past week we’ve seen Elon Musk gives a nazi salute.

Our only hope is to move off these platforms. To make our actions align with the society we want, on our terms. To embrace an ecosystem of software and services that are built to reinforce the public good, positive mental health, real connection, and a better society.

To reduce world harm, we need to move away from Meta’s suite of social apps. Facebook and Messenger are so integrated into so many people’s lives it almost feels like table stakes for existing in modern society. I quit Twitter before it became X and it was fairly easy. Even then, the idea of fully walking away from Meta seemed daunting so I just minimized my use of it.

Meta seems to hold the keys for the only solutions for key parts of modern society.

Facebook, even if it’s viewed by kids as a boomer thing, is still the number one source for meet ups, the main way to find people you’ve lost contact with, the #1 source of sharing photos. On Orcas it is the main way people buy and sell used items and share news. The majority of Americans above a certain age get their news from Facebook and other social media.

The problem is it’s doing loads of harm. We already know Meta is fueling conspiracy theories, increasing depression, and promoting consumerism. It’s products are shown to increase teen suicide. It’s proven to have fueled genocide in Myanmar. The company is even laying the groundwork to do so again in the United States.

And Meta knows the damage its doing, it’s just not profitable to care.

This is a pattern played out over and over again in an economic growth driven society:

• Tobacco companies knew about the risks of smoking and addiction decades before the public did anything about them
• Oil and gas companies knew about climate change decades before the public
• Insurance companies fully understand the harm being caused by denial of care, even if our political system does nothing about it
• And the social media companies know how harmful their products are today

The common thread between these industries is our growth economy pushes incentives to keep growing, regardless of the external cost to society. It’s actually pretty simple:

The more people who smoke, in spite of the cancer, the bigger the business of William Morris. The fuel Exxon Mobile extracts from the Earth is what fuels both the burning of the Earth as well as the increase in its stock. The more techniques United Health Care has to deny coverage, the greater the executive bonuses, the more health care they deny.

These patterns are all driven from the need to grow economics, without limits as to their effects on people. We can see these linkages happening clearly in the above examples, and social media is exactly the same.

Meta knows all the harm they’re causing, but they continue to do it because of an inherent need to amass more power and wealth regardless of the consequences to humanity. It’s built into the very economic structure of public companies. It’s baked into the valley ethos, myths and religion of silicon valley. Disrupt. Embrace hyper scale. Innnovate. Go viral. Move fast and break the world.

It’s time we move to technologies that are built with different values, ones that serve making a better, more peaceful and equitable society.

The Degrowth movement is based on the simple analysis that the core problems of modern society is that economic growth is driving nearly everything we do. Growth is destroying the Earth, oppressing others, and not making a very particularly great life for most anyone. Even those at the “top of the pyramid” of our society are under a constant pressure for performance because in a growth society, you never have enough.

I used to think that computing was this benign force for the world. That it was inherently more connective, had a lower impact on the environment, and offered humans a great way forward. Instead I’ve seen that it’s rotten to the core, because the fundamental driver of our society is growth.

With PopCap, there was a point where we were making great games that we were proud of, and making millions in profit per year for a small indie studio. There was this constant insecurity; however, and so in order to feel safe we kept growing. The more we grew, the more we felt we had to grow to be safe. That if we just grew 15% more we’d be stable and could breath out.

The problem is our growth society is such that lie is the core of the trap. There’s always the next milestone and “if we just get that next level…” but unfortunately humans aren’t wired that way. We are built with the law of diminishing returns. And this is what’s so insidious in a growth society.

Growth is ostensibly the way we get our basic needs met, experience self acceptance, or receive social validation, but if we can never be fully satisfied, then we’re in a very viscous cycle of insecurity. If everything around us is pushing a culture of growth, this gets worse. How many people do you know who keep accepting promotions and worse work life balance even though they know it will make them more unhappy just so they can grow their finances?

If our answers to our insecurities are growth, but growth is what’s driving the insecurity, then we will just more rapidly destroy the Earth.

And that is what we’re doing.

The software we use everyday is built to exploit those insecurities because the best way to grow in a growth culture is to exploit people’s inherent insecurities. If I want to sell you a beauty product, it’s a lot easier if you feel inadequate.

While this is true across all levels of consumerism, the fact that technology companies are in the middle of many of social and news interactions means it’s made all the worse because we are comparative creatures.

Our insecurities about ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, or the world drive more clicks, thus the software we use amplifies those insecurities.

We don’t have to use services that increase teen suicide, or funnel multiple genocides, or data-groom children into meat puppets for advertising to share photos, or see updates from friends. We don’t have to be left feeling worse about ourselves and the world every time we try and connect online.

In order to do so we have move beyond growth as the main driver of technology. We need to slow technology down so that we didn’t measure the success of social media based on engagement or ad dollars, but instead usefulness, connection, or empathy.

When I was a kid technology was new, cool and exciting. Computers were a tool of the mind, and if you could think of it they could do it. Fairly quickly the internet became a thing, allowing you to connect to millions of people. As computers and the internet became more adopted, they became even more useful, eventually integrating into every facet of our lives.

This computing revolution allowed me to make an early online multiplayer video game called ARC with a friend while in college. From there we worked for Sierra Online in their internet group WON.net, where I made it easier to download customer skins, maps, and mods to games. After that I was part of starting PopCap Games, eventually being part of the creation of games like Bejeweled, Peggle, Zuma, and Plants vs. Zombies. Afterwards I spent years at the bleeding edge of Virtual and Augmented reality.

My whole life has been shaped by computers, to the point where it’s near impossible to imagine my existence otherwise. My life has been very fortunate in that way, allowing me to meet people, visit places, create things and quite frankly, do so many unimaginable things.

The problem is, technology and tools exist within the culture and construct of the society that created them. Our society is organized around economic growth, software exists to serve that purpose. The expression “software will eat the world” is commonly thought to mean that it will integrate into all aspects of our lives, but in reality it just means that computing will just accelerate the destruction of the earth that started over the last hundred years or so. While this will provide immense power and wealth for a few this path will come at ever increasing suffering for the majority of all life.

I propose we start to look critically at the software and services we use. Ask us how they benefit us, how they ourselves and others, and find alternatives so we can avoid a society that burns itself to the ground. Alternatives may be less convenient in the short term, but also less destructive. Driving more adoption and support will make them superior over time. Alternatives need to exist outside of mantra of growth, outside of maximizing shareholder value at all costs.

Most acceptable alternatives exist within open source communities, are built on non-capitalistic principals, with distributed power structures, and based on open standards. Any reasonable alternative will almost always avoid advertising as a business model. Non-open source alternatives will be part of the solutions, but won’t be ran by companies packaging a bunch of disparate tools and fund completely unrelated R&D.

Over the coming week I plan to break down different popular services, provide examples of what the problems are, and then highlight various alternatives. I’ll try and lay out what the trade offs are to the alternatives and hopefully paint a picture of different ways for the software ecosystems to work.

PS: Happy Birthday Matt