IPFS and digital preservation in the multi-crisis present

00:00:00,000Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Robin and Dietrich and everybody, for inviting me to00:00:08,400 00:00:08,400this event. My name is Cade. I run a small research organization called the New Design00:00:15,080 00:00:15,080Congress. And today I wanted to share a research project that we did with an IPFS-aligned organization00:00:21,280 00:00:21,280with the support of the Filecoin Foundation. It's going to be a bit deep. Let me get my00:00:26,480 00:00:27,480stopwatch going. It's going to be pretty rich in content. I've erred on the side of caution00:00:38,120 00:00:38,120by putting a little bit too much information into the slides^[1]. We're not going to cover00:00:42,680 00:00:42,680all of it today, but what I will say is that at the end of this presentation is a link00:00:47,440 00:00:47,440to the research and to these slides. So please just let it all wash over you, and then anything00:00:52,680 00:00:52,680that you don't get, either email me or come and check out the material because it's all going to be there for you. 00:00:58,440

00:00:58,440But, before we get started, I'd like to set the scene with a00:01:00,920 00:01:00,920brief video that will summarize a little bit about where I come from:00:01:05,320

00:01:05,320Father: Are you playing Roblox?00:01:06,720
00:01:05,720Daughter: Yeah, I'm playing Roblox.00:01:09,160
00:01:09,160Father: Explain to me what you're doing, though. You're playing Roblox.00:01:11,160
00:01:11,160Daughter: Yeah, I'm playing Roblox. I'm taking money from people.00:01:15,800
00:01:15,800Father: You're getting on the phone and then you're stealing money from people?00:01:18,520
00:01:18,520Daughter: Yeah.
Father: And you have this in your basement of your Roblox house.00:01:22,320
00:01:22,320Daughter: Yeah. Hold on. Don't disturb that. My intern Kate actually is helping.00:01:32,040
00:01:33,720Father: She's your intern? You have a little office in your basement where you're scamming people?00:01:38,600

00:01:41,960So, I love this video. Essentially, the reason why it's really funny is this is the perfect00:01:49,320 00:01:49,320example of what New Design Congress is all about. Essentially, while we build these rich technical00:01:54,600 00:01:54,600systems, be it IPFS or Roblox, the ways in which they're used are often far beyond the intent that we have for them.00:02:04,000

00:02:04,000I love the idea that there's these tiny children basically becoming the next00:02:09,240 00:02:09,240Chapos, basically scamming the hell out of people through these iPads. It sort of makes00:02:14,760 00:02:14,760me wonder, after I saw that clip and did some diving into the economics and labor abuse of00:02:22,120 00:02:22,120children getting other children to build stuff for them in Roblox and get paid nothing for it.00:02:29,320 00:02:29,320It made me really think about that child that you see sitting across from you at another table in00:02:34,520 00:02:34,520a restaurant that's on their iPad. We used to think they're just watching Frozen over and over,00:02:38,840 00:02:38,840but maybe in fact they actually like scamming everybody.00:02:40,840

00:02:40,840This is one of the stickers for New00:02:45,320 00:02:45,320Design Congress: Ethical Design No Thanks. Part of this work is, part of the world that I come from00:02:50,120 00:02:50,120and the foundation of New Design Congress is looking at the ways in which we see the world00:02:57,320 00:02:57,320and then how that's out of alignment, as system designers, with the way the world actually is.00:03:01,640

00:03:01,640We're an independent socio-technical research organization, which means that we confront the00:03:06,680 00:03:06,680gap between what appears to be happening and what is actually happening in digitized societies.00:03:12,360 00:03:12,360Now, the point here is to say that it's not about being some kind of elitist sort of "everything that00:03:19,240 00:03:19,240people are doing in systems design is wrong," but rather that the complexity combined with00:03:23,640 00:03:23,640the shortcomings of tools and practices we have today often lead to bad outcomes and the kind of00:03:29,320 00:03:29,320response that we have, which are things like ethical design, ethical AI, things like that,00:03:33,400 00:03:33,400are not enough to overcome some of the problems that we have. So, the way to think of New Design00:03:38,040 00:03:38,040Congress itself in this room would be to think of a digital security firm that comes in and consults00:03:43,960 00:03:43,960or does research and finds vulnerabilities as red teamers, but we don't do it on a technical level,00:03:49,560 00:03:49,560we do it on a social or an ethical level. So, we're like an ethical red teaming organization and what00:03:54,840 00:03:54,840we do is we follow that same process. So, we do deep research, such as what I'm going to present00:03:59,720 00:03:59,720today. We then practice responsible disclosure, like any other security organization, and then we00:04:06,840 00:04:06,840publish everything in Open Access after we complete that disclosure process.00:04:11,960

00:04:13,880And so, as part of that process, we engaged with Filecoin and a Filecoin aligned project,00:04:20,280 00:04:20,280funded project, called Webrecorder between November 2021 and May 2022, which led to00:04:26,040 00:04:26,040the project or the publication Memory and Uncertainty,^[2] or as was talked about today,00:04:31,640 00:04:31,640are we all fucked? The answer is "kind of," but it didn't start out that way. So the team,00:04:39,320 00:04:40,200I want to throw this slide up because these are the kind of the people who can be credited on this.00:04:44,900

00:04:44,900There was the really tight collaboration between Webrecorder and us at New Design Congress,00:04:51,000 00:04:51,000myself and my co-conspirator, my co-defendant, Benjamin Royer, who can't unfortunately be here00:04:57,480 00:04:57,480today. But then of course, the other people from Webrecorder (Ilya, Lorena, Ed Summers),00:05:02,680 00:05:03,240basically helping to fuel that work and frame it for us. And, then of course Dietrich, who's here00:05:07,400 00:05:07,400today, kind of acting as like the champion on the Filecoin/ Protocol Labs side.00:05:12,920 00:05:12,920All of it came together to produce, I think, a piece of research that's really great.00:05:16,680 00:05:16,680And this is where the slides... What's up? Down a little bit. Okay, great.00:05:23,020

00:05:23,020This is where the00:05:24,040 00:05:24,040slides begin to get a little bit dense. So, I'm just going to riff a little bit on what we started00:05:29,320 00:05:29,320to explore. And you can either listen to me or look at the slides or both if you have like a00:05:33,560 00:05:33,560brain that can do that. But, as I said at the beginning, all of this is available online,00:05:39,320 00:05:39,320so you can come back through it and read it.00:05:41,180

00:05:41,180Essentially, what we did was we looked at the00:05:43,480 00:05:43,480decentralization component of an emerging tool, in this case, the Webrecorder platform, which is00:05:49,960 00:05:50,920unlike the Internet Archive, it's kind of the inverse. Rather than being00:05:53,800 00:05:54,840tied to an institution, Webrecorder allows you to take very high fidelity captures of the web00:06:01,320 00:06:01,960and faithfully reproduce them in a local context. It's a very impressive piece of technology and it's00:06:06,840 00:06:06,840in its early stages. Of course, it's also gaining a lot of attention as it's very useful for00:06:11,640 00:06:11,640researchers, everybody from cultural researchers all the way through to journalists working in00:06:16,600 00:06:16,600disinformation to produce very high quality records of things on the internet. But, we were00:06:22,920 00:06:22,920really looking broadly, and when we were commissioned by Ilya and the team at Webrecorder,00:06:27,880 00:06:27,880at the wider range of issues that could then inform both the specification of their WACZ format,00:06:34,200 00:06:34,200that's the Web Archive Compressed Zip file archival format, and the interfaces of the00:06:40,120 00:06:40,120tools that are then built with the WACZ specification baked into it.00:06:44,840

00:06:44,840So, this covers00:06:45,240 00:06:45,240everything from identity and structures, what are the use cases, socio-technical security,00:06:50,280 00:06:50,280what are the dangers and threats from not a device perspective, from a person-to-person perspective,00:06:54,760 00:06:55,560integrity. How can archives be manipulated? Can people make changes to archives? This00:07:01,160 00:07:01,160is a big thing, I think, in IPFS land as well, the immutability and the kind of00:07:05,560 00:07:05,560proof of record or the source of truth of different kinds of material that's stored in IPFS.00:07:10,520 00:07:10,520Of course, permissions and connectivity. A lot of challenges with archives around how expensive00:07:16,360 00:07:16,360they are to maintain indefinitely. They're kind of a complete opposite of a capitalist service,00:07:21,480 00:07:21,480because archives don't make money usually, they're kind of just giant black holes for financial00:07:26,840 00:07:26,840like input. Things like that. But, even going deeper into looking at how navigation affects00:07:32,760 00:07:32,760the ways in which we relate to large collections of material and the agency questions, so how do,00:07:38,760 00:07:38,760what do the people whose material is stored in a digital archive, how are those people like,00:07:44,440 00:07:44,440do they have a say? How does that affect them? Do they even know about it? What's the difference00:07:48,200 00:07:48,200between someone who knows that they've been archived and somebody who doesn't? These sorts of things.00:07:51,940

00:07:51,940And, the point here is really to kind of look at this from a digital archiving perspective00:07:56,920 00:07:56,920and understand that by doing so, you get, it acts as a very good starting point for the broader00:08:03,960 00:08:05,560understanding of the politics and the social conditions of data storage on a massive societal00:08:12,280 00:08:12,280level. Even your iCloud account or your Google Gmail account. Both of these are actually archives.00:08:18,680 00:08:18,680Everything that we have online, to quote Yuk Hui, the Hong Kong philosopher, "everything is an archive."00:08:24,200

00:08:24,200So, as part of this project, we did a landscaping study and we also did a round of consultation with00:08:29,880 00:08:29,880Webrecorder. And then through Webrecorder's connections, we were able, we were very privileged00:08:34,680 00:08:34,680enough to get a series of interviews with a wide number of very, very established people00:08:41,560 00:08:41,560from various disciplines within the archival space, as a sort of large-scale, qualitative,00:08:47,000 00:08:47,000first round of interviews that lasted for 90 minutes or longer, and culminated in like a broad00:08:52,440 00:08:52,920snapshot of the conditions of archiving and how they relate to digitized structures, both from the00:08:59,240 00:08:59,240emergence of open source tooling, such as Webrecorder, but also in the storage and maintenance00:09:04,440 00:09:04,440of these things, such as, in this case, IPFS.00:09:09,440

00:09:09,440And so, what we found is in this research, and I00:09:12,680 00:09:12,680think, you know, there aren't actually too many examples of a project that has this kind of00:09:17,640 00:09:18,520depth and breadth in terms of how it approaches these sorts of things. We found, like, 10 key00:09:23,720 00:09:23,720findings here that I'd like to share with you today. We're not going to spend equal amounts00:09:28,040 00:09:28,040of time on all of them because, you know, time is a harsh, oppressive creature and we, you know,00:09:33,720 00:09:33,720I only have a small amount of it. So, instead, I'm going to really riff on a couple of these that I00:09:38,920 00:09:38,920think are extremely important for the people in this room today, and then again, refer you to the00:09:44,040 00:09:44,680slide deck and everything like that if you'd like to know more about the broader work.00:09:47,560

00:09:49,000So, number one, the definition of archiving is broad but flattened by digital tools.00:09:53,720 00:09:53,720So, what this meant is that in the process of archiving, whether people were from indigenous00:09:58,440 00:09:58,440backgrounds as archivists or whether they were journalists or people working in institutions,00:10:04,280 00:10:04,280like very big institutions, what we found is that, broadly speaking, the tools in which that00:10:10,120 00:10:10,120are used to both create archives and also store them, including protocols, all of them had clashes00:10:16,360 00:10:16,360with how different people in these spaces understood what archiving meant and what was00:10:21,160 00:10:21,160possible as a result of that. The ways in which they could express their self-determination of00:10:26,600 00:10:26,600their practice of collecting, categorizing, and saving material for recall later was all deeply00:10:33,080 00:10:33,080influenced by digital tools and there were no two people that had the same kind of00:10:38,120 00:10:38,920relationship or definition of archiving despite it being a fairly well-known practice.00:10:43,640

00:10:43,640And so, we had, you know, people who saw these from a perspective of political action. We saw00:10:50,120 00:10:50,120things from people who came at it from a purely historical context. There were people who, again,00:10:55,480 00:10:55,480like investigative journalism, which isn't necessarily tied to, like, political activism.00:10:59,640 00:10:59,640Things like that. But, broadly speaking, even things like the inability to conceptualize00:11:06,520 00:11:07,320the kind of size of an archive, especially like a decentralized archive when compared to like00:11:12,360 00:11:12,360physical archives, had drastic effects on how people then maintained or cultivated and curated00:11:19,080 00:11:19,080those spaces. 00:11:21,080

00:11:21,080Two, web archives and, broadly speaking, decentralized storage is complex and00:11:28,120 00:11:28,120overwhelming to the people that make them. So, I'm almost certain that everybody in this room00:11:32,200 00:11:32,200kind of knows this already, but what the research kind of found for us was just how severe and00:11:38,360 00:11:38,920independent and individualized that was. So, what we saw was that it's the classic00:11:46,200 00:11:46,200McLuhan, like Marshall McLuhan, kind of thing. We build our tools, we shape our tools, and00:11:51,000 00:11:51,000thereafter our tools shape us. The differences between the tools and their outputs makes it00:11:56,680 00:11:56,680difficult to provide access that's universal, and so what archivers tend to do is like a grassroots00:12:03,720 00:12:03,720kind of, in this current moment where the tools have these shortcomings, basically either rely00:12:08,600 00:12:08,600on multiple tooling, so getting like sort of different categorizations and very few standardized00:12:13,960 00:12:13,960sort of collections of material into an archived container, or then create hacks and workarounds00:12:21,080 00:12:21,080to get into that. And what we also found is, you know, similar to things like content00:12:26,520 00:12:26,520addressing and other forms of, like, linkage between things. People tended to just either use timestamps00:12:32,760 00:12:32,760or the link itself as like the primary means for navigating large data sets.00:12:36,360

00:12:36,360And when I say00:12:38,360 00:12:38,360large data sets, I mean web archiving, which is like, you know, three dimensions of complexity.00:12:43,240 00:12:43,240One is like the generation of material on a platform that can be, that's like infinite00:12:49,000 00:12:49,000potentially, just based entirely, the only limitation here is storage. The second dimension00:12:54,040 00:12:54,040is like the breadth of websites, so the availability of different websites rather than like, you know,00:12:58,040 00:12:58,040just focusing on content creation on one particular platform. And, then of course time and the idea of00:13:03,960 00:13:04,600material changing over time and needing to save all of that adds that third dimension. And so, when00:13:08,840 00:13:08,840you're looking at archives that have that level of complexity over time, then the ways in which00:13:13,960 00:13:13,960people relate to those and how it can then overwhelm them is extremely, it's very easy to do that.00:13:20,800

00:13:20,800So, the third one, and this is one I want to touch on for a little bit longer, it's part of the00:13:26,280 00:13:26,280broader work that we've done for the past few years at New Design Congress, is that we found00:13:30,760 00:13:30,760that decentralized solutions, such as IPFS, are plagued with danger and much of it is unknown00:13:35,800 00:13:35,800or unaddressed. Now what this means is that in 2020, I wrote an essay for New Design Congress00:13:42,040 00:13:42,040called Optimism and Emergency in the Peer-to-Peer Network^[3], which describes some of the historical00:13:47,160 00:13:47,160context of how the utopian or the kind of, the optimism that we share around the kind of goals00:13:55,080 00:13:55,080of IPFS to become a planetary-wide protocol, decentralization protocol, carries with it00:14:01,800 00:14:01,800severe existential risk that to this day remains essentially unaccounted for. And this is true not00:14:07,560 00:14:07,560just for IPFS. I'm not singling that out, it's relevant for this research because its relationship00:14:13,240 00:14:13,240to the work with Webrecorder and the idea that Webrecorder would like to put all of their00:14:18,760 00:14:18,760archives on IPFS. But it's also true of Secure Scuttlebutt, the Dat Foundation. In the piece00:14:24,360 00:14:24,360itself, I went into detail about the historical context, which was how BitTorrent was weaponized00:14:29,400 00:14:29,400against essentially anybody who was involved in like the distribution of copyright infringement-00:14:36,520 00:14:36,520infringing material, and how that then essentially kneecapped the entire sort of free information00:14:41,560 00:14:41,560movement in the early 21st century, which then gave birth to services like Spotify and the00:14:46,280 00:14:46,280media conglomerate that we have today, which was piggybacked off the technological achievements of00:14:50,920 00:14:50,920BitTorrent, but sacrificed almost everybody involved in that as a process.00:14:54,560

00:14:54,560So, that sort of historical00:14:56,760 00:14:56,760context remains sort of forgotten and in the context of archival, whether or not it was a sort00:15:02,760 00:15:02,760of an indigenous archival effort or a more institutional one, what we found is that there00:15:09,560 00:15:09,560were differing levels of awareness of collective institutional power, and how it's held, and how the00:15:15,240 00:15:15,240consolidation of custodianship in a decentralized system creates power imbalances that kind of rival00:15:24,360 00:15:24,360the things that we see today in centralized systems. So, what we have is like this, and I was00:15:29,160 00:15:29,240talking a bit with Robin about this last night, if we think about things like Web3 and how Web300:15:35,000 00:15:35,000itself has sort of is yet to reach its potential. At the same time I can't think of an industry00:15:41,240 00:15:41,240that suffered more attacks not just from hacking, but also from like attempts at capital to00:15:46,600 00:15:46,600consolidate that, like, you know, just almost bottomless amounts of money being injected00:15:51,080 00:15:51,080into the system with the goal of essentially maintaining you know control, you know, the 51%00:15:55,320 00:15:56,200argument, right? Just as a really simple example of that. The amount of resources that go into00:16:03,080 00:16:03,080attacking these systems is extremely high and so through this work, and through other kind of,00:16:10,200 00:16:10,200sort of, related research, we found that, like, the broader defenses that need to be there00:16:17,160 00:16:17,160are just simply not.00:16:18,160

00:16:18,160And so, when we spoke to archivists these were things, like really simple00:16:22,040 00:16:22,040things, such as: an archival team in an institution has a high degree of consolidated institutional00:16:28,040 00:16:28,040power. They have legal protections, they might have a full legal team that might help them00:16:33,400 00:16:34,200to maintain their, they might live in a jurisdiction that grants them immunity from00:16:38,360 00:16:39,160holding certain types of material. But, then because they work alongside people who are00:16:44,280 00:16:44,280freelancers and things like that, when those people then take a mirror of their IPFS collection00:16:49,640 00:16:49,640and start engaging with it, those people don't have the same legal resources because they're00:16:53,960 00:16:53,960not a part of those institutions. They don't have, they might live in different jurisdictions00:16:57,560 00:16:57,560that see certain types of information as not having the same immunity that the people in00:17:02,280 00:17:02,280sort of institutions might have. And so, you have immediately, just through the interactions between00:17:07,880 00:17:07,880different people the injection of IPFS or a similar decentralized system, creates an entire00:17:13,800 00:17:13,800sort of Merkle tree, if you like, of potential legal fragility just in that act of, like,00:17:20,600 00:17:20,600collaborating between people in this sort of decentralization first strategy.00:17:25,320

00:17:28,360The fourth finding is that the shortcomings of today's tools affect the quality of archives.00:17:33,000 00:17:33,000So, this is essentially that like, we have a series of tooling that has, it excels in some ways and00:17:41,480 00:17:41,560doesn't excel in other ways. Immutability is part of this. It's also how the tools work and how00:17:46,360 00:17:46,360quickly things can be retrieved. All these sorts of things. Over time, as people use them, they then00:17:52,040 00:17:52,040form opinions around what's possible and what's not possible, which then becomes assumptions on00:17:56,360 00:17:56,360the user side, which then become culturally entrenched, which then leads to the narrowing00:18:01,400 00:18:01,400of possibilities once technology or interfaces, new systems have been developed, and then, and00:18:07,400 00:18:07,400people become familiar with them. So, this is important to the context of IPFS because it means00:18:12,840 00:18:13,800that the kind of historical custodianship that we might have today of. like, the Internet Archive00:18:19,640 00:18:19,640being able to sort of shape, or similar institutions being able to shape, how these systems work,00:18:25,400 00:18:26,200once that moves into a more decentralized space there's an opportunity here to reset00:18:30,520 00:18:30,520the expectation of what's possible with large-scale storage and large-scale archiving.00:18:35,400 00:18:35,400But, that is dependent on the priorities and, like, the flexibility of everything from the protocol00:18:41,720 00:18:41,720to the interfaces themselves.00:18:42,720

00:18:42,720The fifth finding is that we need new interfaces for navigating00:18:48,680 00:18:48,680complex archives and I think this is related to a couple others, but deserves a special mention00:18:52,920 00:18:52,920to itself. It also leads into a finding that's coming up in a second as well, which is that00:18:58,360 00:18:58,360as we have, basically, people were overwhelmed. We heard from large numbers of people who are,00:19:04,600 00:19:04,600in some cases, very highly technical people who understand how to set up crawlers and use docker00:19:09,720 00:19:09,720containers either locally or, like, spin up a digital ocean droplets things, like this, and just00:19:14,680 00:19:14,680basically go at it and start like automatic crawling services, and when people started to use00:19:20,760 00:19:20,760those systems, they would then pull back from that when they started to then either curate or00:19:26,040 00:19:26,040otherwise navigate or manage their collections, and in many cases we saw working, like, practices00:19:32,840 00:19:32,840of archivists- people who had been in these industries for like 20 or 30 years even longer-00:19:37,320 00:19:37,320using literally excel spreadsheets to basically navigate massive data sets that some, again, some00:19:43,720 00:19:43,720of which were, you know, still using things like IPFS. So, even with this idea of having, like, a00:19:48,760 00:19:48,760navigation structure within the protocol or, you know, a navigation structure or even searchable00:19:53,320 00:19:53,320structures inside of tools like Webrecorder, what we actually found on the ground is that all of00:19:58,600 00:19:58,680those systems were not actually meeting the needs of the complexities of how people were00:20:03,000 00:20:03,000struggling to use these systems. And so, yeah, the most astonishing thing was finding people00:20:08,840 00:20:08,840who had massive, you know, terabytes upon terabytes, of use- of archived material who use00:20:15,320 00:20:16,120markups within the archive so they modify and add annotations inside the archives for themselves00:20:21,320 00:20:21,320and then keep track of things through these signposts and a giant excel spreadsheet that00:20:26,200 00:20:26,200allows them to main- basically acts as like a giant menu system. And that, I think, remains one00:20:31,720 00:20:31,720of the hardest and most interesting problems from a pure user side of dealing with this material.00:20:36,920

00:20:39,080Alongside that is another thing which I think is relevant to IPFS- which is that00:20:45,400 00:20:46,040we found that tool design influences the effects of traumatic content. An,d what that meant is that00:20:51,800 00:20:51,800in the discussion that we spoke, when we spoke to people, and this is covered in the report as well,00:20:56,360 00:20:57,000because of the time frame of when we started doing the work- which was November 202100:21:01,160 00:21:01,800the the war in Ukraine basically started, you know, a few months into the work that we were doing-00:21:07,800 00:21:07,800and we actually lost a number of people who we wanted to interview because their commitments00:21:13,160 00:21:13,160to their- basically that their entire priorities shifted in the first half of 2022, at the same time00:21:19,800 00:21:19,800as everybody knows we were coming out of the kind of deep lockdowns of COVID. And so, we spoke00:21:26,120 00:21:26,120to a number of people who had been doing work in some cases for decades and had been following00:21:32,200 00:21:32,200material organizations archiving, you know, groups of all like movements and things and were then00:21:37,560 00:21:37,560beginning to see, you know, the traumatic events of, like, large scale death emerging through the00:21:43,240 00:21:43,240stories of the archives that they were they were basically curating. And what we found there is that00:21:49,160 00:21:49,160as we reflected on that with the participants, there were participants who were very clearly00:21:54,600 00:21:54,600able to show examples of how the decisions that had been made by a system design team and user00:22:01,160 00:22:01,160experience research team to prioritize or create flows in which they could review content or00:22:07,960 00:22:07,960display large amounts of content whether it was in grid, whether it was, uh, algorithmically00:22:12,680 00:22:14,280surface for them, whether it was a tagging system, whatever, it was different ways in which00:22:18,440 00:22:18,440interfaces worked to then surface kind of content different types of content had the potential to00:22:24,600 00:22:25,320amplify or deaden the potential traumatic effects of violent, or traumatic, other forms of traumatic, content.00:22:32,980

00:22:32,980And so, in our landscape study we kind of looked at this and we started to look into the00:22:37,880 00:22:37,880idea of, like, is there a lot of material, how much research is there into the idea of the00:22:42,680 00:22:42,680psychological effects of traumatic content and the way that interfaces and systems00:22:47,320 00:22:47,320can amplify that? And, you'd be surprised, or maybe not, to learn that there's actually not that much00:22:52,120 00:22:52,120out there about that. And so, this is another area that I think that once you then deploy something00:22:57,720 00:22:57,720at scale, at a protocol level, that there's an opportunity here to explore that and see how00:23:03,400 00:23:03,400the protocol can mitigate some of that.00:23:06,400

00:23:06,400Number seven: the colonial methodology and language has00:23:11,640 00:23:11,640narrowed the potential for web preservation. This is ah, I think this was touched on a little bit00:23:16,680 00:23:16,680earlier in some of the talks today. The idea here that, like, differing perspectives are necessary in00:23:21,560 00:23:21,560order to understand how computing can be. How we can transcend some of the limitations of computing00:23:27,320 00:23:27,320today. The ways in which we find that immediately is in the sort of ceding of power for indigenous00:23:34,360 00:23:34,360or other non-western perspectives. This is true for privacy. It's true for decentralization. And00:23:40,680 00:23:40,680it's true for even things like what is a permanent record. What is the source of truth all of these I00:23:45,800 00:23:45,800things can be challenged in a very healthy way by creating and amplifying those spaces and kind of00:23:52,440 00:23:52,440de-centering the western context from these conversations and also de-centering the kind of00:23:57,720 00:23:57,720influence of the western sort of explosion of computing and its computing culture that's00:24:04,440 00:24:04,440sort of happened from the 1970's through to today. And, some of that even can be seen in language.00:24:09,720 00:24:09,800Right, so things like the term capture in archiving has direct connotations to the kind of, you know,00:24:17,480 00:24:17,480the extremely racist kind of late 1800's, 1900's, and beyond, act of, you know, literally taking stuff out00:24:27,320 00:24:27,320of indigenous societies and hauling it back to western countries. Things like that. But,00:24:33,720 00:24:33,720That sort of like, that kind of language which you know is deeply discussed as part of critique00:24:39,960 00:24:39,960of archival in an academic sense, of archival politics in an academic sense, doesn't translate00:24:45,160 00:24:45,160into into our sort of space.00:24:47,560

00:24:47,560And, just to add an extra provocation to that, one thing that came up00:24:50,760 00:24:50,760in the discussions in with participants was how archive as a term has kind of come to mean "half00:24:58,280 00:24:58,280delete" in like things like emails applications or in your chat apps, where you have the ability00:25:07,480 00:25:07,480to delete something but you also have the ability to archive something which is kind of sort of a00:25:12,200 00:25:12,200delete. And so, even in these contexts of, like, the narrowing of the language of archival services as00:25:17,880 00:25:17,880it's being- or archival practice as it's being used in other contexts has like potential dramatic00:25:23,400 00:25:23,400effects in very subtle ways around how users and designers and systems people understand like what00:25:29,960 00:25:29,960these actions actually mean, essentially.00:25:32,960

00:25:32,960How am I good for time? Okay, a couple minutes all right.00:25:36,760

00:25:37,800So, eight, digital archiving is vulnerable to political and ecological threats. We've been doing a lot of00:25:41,960 00:25:41,960research, and it was backed up in this particular work, around things like the decoupling of the00:25:46,600 00:25:46,600sort of global supply chain and the global connectivity networks and how the kind of00:25:52,360 00:25:52,360volatility around that threatens the kind of maintenance and storage of archives. We've looked00:25:57,880 00:25:57,880at some of the ways in which things like the merger, the fusing of Filecoin, aside alongside00:26:04,760 00:26:04,760IPFS, has, like, tremendous benefits, but also has tremendous drawbacks. For example: it makes it00:26:09,960 00:26:09,960more difficult to use in places like China, because of the connotations of blockchains00:26:15,320 00:26:15,320that are not controlled by the state, for example. And that is a discussion that, like,00:26:21,000 00:26:21,240the New Design Congress isn't interested in so much as how, like, that how that can change rapidly00:26:28,520 00:26:28,520for people on the ground, based on the sort of mood of the day. And that's sort of where we got00:26:33,000 00:26:33,000into with the, with the participants. Um, the, this one here is a big like if you're interested in00:26:42,680 00:26:42,680this then like there's a lot of work on New Design Congress that like delves into this.00:26:46,360

00:26:46,360But, essentially the the broader kind of, as the kind of present begins to sort of destabilize00:26:52,840 00:26:53,400the ways in which that can have an adverse effect is just not really understood very well. And no00:26:59,480 00:26:59,480more is that really visible than in the context of, like, archive integrity. So, I touched on this00:27:04,440 00:27:04,440at the beginning. Archive integrity is an interesting context because while we believe00:27:08,840 00:27:08,840collectively that, like, there should be sources of truth and immutability, things like this, one of the00:27:14,120 00:27:14,120challenges that come with that is that they introduce these new kinds of threats that00:27:17,800 00:27:17,800aren't really dealt with, uh, before. Like, when we started this work back in 2021, Twitter had not00:27:26,520 00:27:26,520yet been bought by Elon Musk, uh, the just the sheer fact that something can change so rapidly in the00:27:31,880 00:27:31,880custodianship of an archive, in this case the entire historical archive of every tweet ever made00:27:37,480 00:27:37,480can be basically put into private hands, this is, like, a threat that we collectively haven't dealt with.00:27:42,480

00:27:42,480And, I talked about this a little bit when I talked about like the attacks of capital on Web3.00:27:47,000 00:27:47,000This is an example of, like, something like what happened with, um, with Twitter, could absolutely00:27:53,720 00:27:53,720happen with a Web3, IPFS-backed service, as well. Absolutely. But, the other thing, too, is that when00:28:00,840 00:28:00,840people talked about in as archivists, they talked about archival systems and integrity, there's this00:28:06,840 00:28:06,840huge issue of people collecting information such as on Facebook or Instagram or other00:28:12,440 00:28:12,440services that require a login which then leaks personal data into those archives which then00:28:17,640 00:28:17,640need to be redacted. And so, what we have are these sort of, this kind of, this tension point between00:28:23,560 00:28:23,560the desire for system to create authenticity, where we can say cryptographically that something00:28:28,760 00:28:28,760hasn't been tampered with, and the need, the real world today need, of people to be able to redact00:28:34,520 00:28:34,520any kind of personal information that leaks into an archive. And those two system, those two needs,00:28:39,320 00:28:39,320those two goals are fundamentally, diametrically opposed to each other. And there is not that much00:28:45,400 00:28:45,400discussion into how to actually begin to start to properly solve that.00:28:49,080

00:28:49,080 Finally, the emerging tools,00:28:53,080 00:28:53,080such as Webrecorder, Open Archive, these other tools that exist, that are kind of the next00:28:59,240 00:28:59,240generation, if you like, of open source tooling, that would rely as the first adopters for services and00:29:03,320 00:29:03,320protocols like IPFS, are entering a field that desperately needs them, but struggles with their00:29:08,040 00:29:08,040shortcomings. And so, as part of the research, because it was done in, like, in conjunction00:29:12,600 00:29:12,600with Webrecorder, was to look at how Webrecorder and its ecosystem is being received by its user00:29:18,520 00:29:18,520base and the struggle there is real. The service is widely known to be quite good, but the ways in00:29:24,120 00:29:24,120which the shortcomings affect people create a tension point there that goes from the interface00:29:29,160 00:29:29,160level, which they're trying to solve now, all the way down to the protocol and deeper systems design.00:29:33,080 00:29:33,720And, it's that stack that, I think, IPFS, you know, can go towards solving more broadly for its user00:29:41,080 00:29:41,080base. And I mean, there's a lot of work going into this, but I think the kind of the depth of how00:29:45,400 00:29:45,400important this is today is sort of potentially not as well understood, or not as surface as it could00:29:51,160 00:29:51,160be. Because essentially, overall, after 20-plus years of relative stability, the threats to, like,00:29:57,480 00:29:57,480large-scale data archive projects are now very, very suddenly here- from the deteriorating00:30:03,480 00:30:03,480political situation in the United States, to the deployment of surveillance infrastructure00:30:08,600 00:30:09,800disguised as pandemic response, to the unjustified war in Ukraine- the political assumptions of the00:30:14,840 00:30:14,840way in which we collect and store and retrieve large data sets as archives are being tested in00:30:21,800 00:30:21,800real time. And what concerns us as part of this research, one as the sort of broader finding that00:30:26,760 00:30:26,760comes out of this is that there is no structure in place to kind of keep track of how that's00:30:32,040 00:30:32,040happening. And, what needs to happen, I think, is like a, like a coalition or some other set of00:30:38,040 00:30:39,320entities that are keeping track of that collectively, in an open source way.00:30:42,920

00:30:44,280So, a couple minutes left. What can we do today because you know not everything's totally screwed.00:30:50,520

00:30:51,320The first one is the anti-user story, which is essentially if the user story, if we've00:30:55,880 00:30:55,880got an x y axis, x-axis is ease of use, and y is user happiness, a user story which is a flawed00:31:02,680 00:31:02,680way of doing uh design, but you know, let's roll with it for anyway. User story: you want in the00:31:08,120 00:31:08,120top right there, ease of use, you want it super easy to use and you want your users to be really happy.00:31:12,760 00:31:12,760An anti-user story is where you do the same sort of design system and design thinking, but where00:31:18,920 00:31:18,920you want your user to be super sad and find the system really awful to use. Which is essentially00:31:24,440 00:31:24,440the same as saying that digital security and user experience design are actually the same thing, but00:31:29,880 00:31:29,880with, like, diametrically opposed goals. Whereas a user experience research team is working to make00:31:35,000 00:31:35,000a system accessible, easy to use, frictionless; digital security team is working to make that00:31:42,920 00:31:42,920user (which is the attacker) as miserable as possible in the system, right? And so, the idea00:31:48,040 00:31:48,040is to corrupt your designers, make design, use design to make horrible UX for your attackers00:31:53,320 00:31:53,320and be aware of this concept of weaponized design, which is when a system harms users while behaving00:31:59,240 00:31:59,240precisely as it's designed to. There's a little bit more on this term; it's the term that we use a00:32:04,120 00:32:04,120lot at New Design Congress. There's an essay called On Weaponized Design^[4] on the site. I don't have time00:32:09,160 00:32:09,160to jump into it today.00:32:10,560

00:32:10,560The second is practicing alternative forking. So, in the same way as we00:32:14,920 00:32:14,920fork code, we need to fork concepts. So, on the right here you see Do Not Fold, Spindle, or00:32:20,520 00:32:20,520Mutilate: A Cultural History of the Punch Card, which is an amazing 1994 paper that talks about the00:32:26,120 00:32:26,680the the civil rights era critique of digital identity as we know it today and how close it00:32:33,000 00:32:33,000got to basically dismantling what we understand a digital identity in this moment, started in UC00:32:39,000 00:32:39,000Berkeley, as people's academic records were serialized into punch cards, and the "do not00:32:44,600 00:32:44,600fold, mutilate, or spindle" was like the kind of political rallying cry against the punch card,00:32:48,840 00:32:48,840which said, you know, "I am not a punch card, I cannot be folded, mutilated or spindled, either."00:32:54,760 00:32:54,760And so, the idea here is to disconnect implementation from risk, looking to history and non-western00:33:00,120 00:33:00,120critical perspective as part of that, not speculative, but rather, sort of alternative forking00:33:05,240 00:33:05,240of history. So you take an idea that you have today and you look into history and you say "okay,00:33:09,320 00:33:09,320so what critiques were there that weren't tried and how do they apply to us today?" And then00:33:15,480 00:33:15,480you fork that and you go conceptually down that road. So, a really good example that we talked00:33:20,760 00:33:20,760about, that Robin and I talked about last night, or shouted at each other at dinner last night,00:33:24,440 00:33:24,440was what if SMTP was invented after Web3, right? So, the idea is, so aside from the fact that this00:33:31,480 00:33:31,480is a preposterous sort of thing, because, like, you know, email is the the absolute, you know, basic00:33:38,360 00:33:38,360component of the internet. If you put all of that limitation or implementation aside and think00:33:43,640 00:33:43,640purely, conceptually, "if SMTP was invented after Web3," everything we know of what happened with SMTP,00:33:51,640 00:33:51,640how it was like abused for spam, and then consolidated into Google, Microsoft, and Apple00:33:57,240 00:33:57,240as like the primary gatekeepers of the entire protocol, what would have happened if the Web300:34:02,120 00:34:02,120struggles of today, especially around fraud, and, you know, attack from similar or higher levels of00:34:08,040 00:34:08,040capital as, you know, what came after SMTP back in the day, what would that look like if a similar00:34:13,800 00:34:13,800protocol had that, like, that sort of, had emerged in a landscape like this today?00:34:18,040 00:34:18,040And then it's that00:34:19,000 00:34:19,000sort of thing and that kind of almost near future science fiction thinking, but not quite because00:34:24,040 00:34:24,040you're firmly rooted in the things that exist today and then looking backwards into history to00:34:28,360 00:34:28,360find the criticisms that are there. These are the sorts of ways I think in which we can begin to00:34:33,080 00:34:33,080kind of break down some of the biases that we have, that are inherent in how we produce systems, simply00:34:38,520 00:34:38,520through the nature of the practices and tools that we use to design systems.00:34:42,520

00:34:42,520And, the third thing would00:34:44,280 00:34:44,280be to mitigate in documentation. We have excellent documentation for open source projects; we have no00:34:49,480 00:34:49,480good documentation, I can't think of any single one, that openly embraces the ways in which tools00:34:54,520 00:34:54,520can be abused. So, in the in this context, setting, for the work that we did with IPFS and Webrecorder,00:35:01,400 00:35:01,400we looked at how, at real examples of how these tools had been used in abusive circumstances.00:35:07,960 00:35:07,960So, we looked at things like harassment campaigns. We went through a series of different00:35:15,160 00:35:15,160scenarios that have happened within the last five years that squarely centered the Internet00:35:21,000 00:35:21,000Archive, IPFS, and Webrecorder as like the tools that were flash points for these sorts of conflicts00:35:27,560 00:35:27,560in the world. And you know, when we talk about, when people sort of talk about, you know, the role or00:35:32,920 00:35:32,920responsibility of an open source project in being abused by bad actors, it's a very uncomfortable00:35:38,440 00:35:38,440conversation. A lot of people kind of shift in their seats. Like "well, we don't condone it, but00:35:42,120 00:35:42,120you know the nature of free software is, you know, anybody can use it, or we have a license that says00:35:46,600 00:35:46,600you can't do this or that." But, what isn't there- what isn't there is, like, the deep research into how to00:35:52,600 00:35:52,600mitigate your own tool's bad effects and then the documentation of that, so that when someone is the00:35:57,960 00:35:57,960target of a harassment campaign through a decentralized service or something similar,00:36:01,960 00:36:01,960they can come to the documentation or reach out to an organization like Citizen Lab, Amnesty International,00:36:07,000 00:36:07,000Tall Poppy, these kinds of crisis response for digital harassment or other sort of digital00:36:11,560 00:36:11,560security risks, and actually begin to... Rather than making those people have to spend time researching00:36:18,520 00:36:19,160and sort of assessing the tool set from the outside, if the documentation is there00:36:23,160 00:36:23,160and it's like alongside how to spin up a docker container for your new service,00:36:26,520 00:36:27,320that, I think, goes a long way to proactively allowing people to effortlessly, and organizations00:36:32,200 00:36:32,200to effortlessly, produce mitigation strategies in the context that they're working in, whether it's00:36:37,000 00:36:37,640targeted journalists, whether it's employees- in the case of like Tall Poppy, its employees being00:36:43,400 00:36:43,400harassed in like, you know, sort of more civil context, rather than governments going after00:36:48,120 00:36:48,120journalists, and things like that.00:36:50,120

00:36:50,120Finally. This is very deep. Thank you for staying with me.00:36:53,000 00:36:53,000I've covered a lot just now. The future. Here's the report: Memory and uncertainty: Web Preservation in the Polycrisis^[2:1]. It's a 94-page report, so if you've got a plane ride back to the United States,00:37:05,640 00:37:05,640you should be able to read some of it if you're bored and you run out of movies to watch. The00:37:11,240 00:37:11,240report is there and it's pretty in-depth. It's available at members.newdesigncongress.org. It's00:37:17,080 00:37:17,080free. We are going to present this work at two academic conferences this year in greater00:37:22,840 00:37:22,840detail. That's the IIPC and RESAW, both of which are archival system, archival based academic00:37:31,240 00:37:31,240conferences and RESAW is actually peer reviewed. And that got peer reviewed, and it was very00:37:36,520 00:37:36,520favorably peer reviewed, so I wanted a little, little gold star for myself for that one. That's00:37:40,760 00:37:40,760excellent. And then finally, yeah, working with IPFS interested projects. So right, now we're working00:37:45,720 00:37:45,720with Open Archive. We worked with Webrecorder. We did anti-user story work with Webrecorder.00:37:50,680 00:37:50,680You can go to the WACZ specs Github issues and find how we did that with them. And then finally,00:37:56,200 00:37:56,200and this is, you know, I guess, my call to action today is that we need to broaden this research.00:37:59,800 00:37:59,800Oh my god, right now is the time to be doing this work. So as I said, we're really interested in this00:38:05,240 00:38:05,240idea of some sort of informal or formal coalition of tracking and maintaining a repository of00:38:11,400 00:38:11,400information that gets to the depths of the intricacies of how these systems are going to00:38:17,240 00:38:17,240be used in the future. Especially in decentralization, especially within the goals that we have of a, you00:38:22,280 00:38:22,280know, a complete paradigm shift in terms of computing. If you're an independent, individual00:38:27,800 00:38:27,800person, and you find this work compelling, or anything we do, you can become a New Design00:38:31,640 00:38:31,640Congress member at members.newdesigncongress.org. It helps us stay independent. We do have a fiscal00:38:37,640 00:38:37,640sponsor, which is Superbloom Design, which is the US 501(c)(3) organization. It also does UX work and if00:38:45,800 00:38:45,800you need UX work for your project they are excellent and I'm not just saying that because00:38:50,360 00:38:50,360they're my fiscal sponsor, but also because they're amazing people. And then yeah, more broadly, this is,00:38:55,640 00:38:55,640like, the work that we're interested in and the trajectory that we're working on and I invite you00:39:00,440 00:39:00,440to, yeah, spend some time looking through the New Design Congress stuff. And I hope that you found00:39:04,600 00:39:04,600this crash course in a very deep research project informative. Thank you so much.00:39:08,440

00:39:15,800Moderator: That was great. Thank you thank you very much.00:39:18,680

00:39:18,680Yes.00:39:19,080

00:39:19,080Moderator: Uh, wait, wait, wait for the microphone, coming, yeah.00:39:22,680

00:39:25,240Hey.00:39:25,640

00:39:25,640Audience Member: There was a report earlier this week, and I think it was point three you mentioned up here00:39:30,360 00:39:30,360was one of the ones that I struggled with a little bit. You talk about being aware of the risks of00:39:36,040 00:39:36,040archiving either incriminating material or material that's linked to harassment campaigns and so on,00:39:40,680 00:39:41,480and one of the things I had a hard time reconciling was the way that same material often ends up being00:39:45,640 00:39:46,280useful as part of, uh, holding like the state accountable for state violence, or like Kiwi00:39:54,520 00:39:54,520Farms accountable for the harassment that they're subjecting people to. In particular, I'm reminded00:40:00,840 00:40:00,840specifically of a report that came out this week out of a Forensic Architect, I believe that used00:40:05,640 00:40:05,640footage from the Portland protests to reconstruct the use of tear gas in those protests to00:40:11,800 00:40:12,600try to classify that Portland police department as having committed a war crime.00:40:16,680 00:40:16,680so I was just wondering if you had any comment on kind of that dichotomy and how to navigate that.00:40:20,520

00:40:22,840Sorry, that's a lot, like that's a- do I have a comment on that?00:40:28,520 00:40:32,920There's like 20 things in my head. It's, it comes down to00:40:37,480 00:40:37,480then, there's a mistake, I think more broadly, that we think that the ways in which we have to respond00:40:43,240 00:40:43,240is through some sort of, that's not something that we navigate through technology, but but at the same00:40:50,040 00:40:50,040time, like, um, the again, there's like literally five things I want to say all at once and they're just00:41:00,440 00:41:00,440coming out of my head at the same time. I guess- I guess the thing is that, like, one of the problems,00:41:03,960 00:41:04,680I guess the thing is that, like, one of the problems that we have is, and I think this is where00:41:09,240 00:41:09,240New Design Congress kind of, I hope that, this is like how people see us is that the, the00:41:15,720 00:41:16,600on one side we have policy or tech criticism that's actually very, become very publicly visible00:41:23,880 00:41:23,880and very accessible, but also, tends to revel in the sort of, the kind of conflict itself,00:41:32,520 00:41:32,520and on the other side we have sort of people who are building technology who either engage in the00:41:37,800 00:41:37,800concepts of things like design ethics, which essentially changes nothing, because it's the00:41:42,360 00:41:42,360systems themselves that we've developed and the context in which we're building them that creates00:41:46,120 00:41:46,120bad outcomes, not whether or not you are, you know, thinking of design justice as you're building00:41:51,480 00:41:51,480something. It can help a little bit and it can make the the spaces, like the the conditions, the00:41:56,360 00:41:56,360material conditions of people building stuff more equitable and better, but it doesn't necessarily00:42:00,920 00:42:00,920lead to good outcomes. And so, I think there's a big gap between like how tech in the 2020's,00:42:08,280 00:42:08,840the 2020's? How tech in the 2010's handled the kind of growing issues with like that you've sort of00:42:17,160 00:42:17,160talked about here, the weaponization of the design, of technology, but at the same time we've reached00:42:21,480 00:42:21,480a point with like policy and and, um, and and criticism where it's very reactive. It deals with00:42:27,800 00:42:27,800things after they've arrived. I mean, a really great example of this is like TikTok, right?00:42:31,880

00:42:31,880I gave a talk last month in Amsterdam at the Institute of Network Cultures00:42:35,320 00:42:35,320where I said, the first half of it was literally like a bunch of people showing off their academic00:42:39,720 00:42:39,720research into the TikTok algorithm, which is great and useful but it's also not progressive,00:42:44,520 00:42:44,520because in order for it to be progressive it has to come before you can, like, see it on TikTok00:42:49,640 00:42:49,640because as everybody here knows, the version of TikTok that's in the public is at least six00:42:55,320 00:42:55,320months old, maybe long- maybe older, right? It's been tested internally for however long and what00:43:00,600 00:43:00,600you're seeing here is essentially like the the platform equivalent of the past. And so, while we00:43:05,160 00:43:05,160have that disconnect, we're never going to fully grapple with it. We're always going to be sort of00:43:10,840 00:43:10,840blindsided in this kind of way, right? Where we're never really going to be able to properly grapple00:43:14,920 00:43:14,920with the, um, with the the potential for harm or the potential for even just, like, what, like, just00:43:21,640 00:43:21,640destabilization in individual contexts, or then- I think the other danger with that, too, is that00:43:26,520 00:43:26,520there's a rising sense of, um, that- it's starting with cyber security, a rising sense that00:43:32,840 00:43:32,840protocol designers must be responsible for the integrity of those systems. I mean, there's a, an00:43:38,520 00:43:38,520AI paper, like, the draft legislation is coming out from the Chinese government about artificial00:43:42,760 00:43:42,760intelligence and the guidance around how Chinese companies can use consumer facing artificial00:43:47,080 00:43:47,080intelligence. One of the things they have there is if your AI lies to your user, you're responsible00:43:51,640 00:43:51,640for that, right? And, so like the kind of tide is sort of shifting towards this idea that, like,00:43:57,080 00:43:57,080platforms are culpable, which is very different from, like, section 23, or these sorts of things,00:44:01,720 00:44:02,360like the idea that like whatever happens on the platform is free speech in the United States.00:44:06,440 00:44:06,440Like, that sort of thing might stay, but what will emerge in its place are things like00:44:10,680 00:44:10,680you're responsible for the editorialization of your algorithm or you're responsible for,00:44:15,000 00:44:15,000uh, you know, you can be sued alongside someone who gets burned by decentralized archive, these00:44:20,760 00:44:20,760sorts of things. And so, I don't know if that answers your question. I think the point I'm00:44:24,920 00:44:24,920trying to make is that it's, like, super complicated.00:44:26,220

00:44:26,220Audience Member: Yeah, I think it does. And just to summarize, to00:44:30,440 00:44:30,440make sure I'm understanding you, is kind of the gist of what you're saying that it's not00:44:34,840 00:44:34,840necessarily about archiving less, but about being more proactive about understanding how what you're00:44:39,400 00:44:39,400archiving can be weaponized and trying to contextualize that information...00:44:42,860

00:44:42,860Yeah.00:44:43,260

00:44:43,260Audience Member: ...in ways that defends against that.00:44:44,960

00:44:44,960And it comes down to, it comes really down to this idea of, like,00:44:48,440 00:44:49,160the provocation of adding documentation. If you've got documentation for all of the ways in which you00:44:53,880 00:44:53,880can troubleshoot an open source application, like why don't we have that but for, like, the kind of00:44:59,640 00:44:59,640socio-technical issues that you might encounter, right? So, like, I can learn about how to fix my00:45:05,320 00:45:05,320terrible NextCloud server, but I can't figure, I don't have like the equivalent of like how, like,00:45:11,400 00:45:11,400how to deal with, like, the the issues that might arise just from a social perspective or a00:45:15,480 00:45:15,480political perspective. And again, this is, like, in lockstep with open sources inability to properly00:45:20,680 00:45:20,680grapple with, like, moderation tooling and all sorts of things like that, yeah.00:45:23,080

00:45:23,080Audience Member: Okay, awesome. Thank you.00:45:25,080

00:45:25,080Yeah, good question. Thank you. Very, very hard question. Any others? There's a lot there.00:45:33,640 00:45:33,640We'll leave it there for lunch. Thank you. Thank you so much.00:45:41,240