A. Thoughts on real-life community vs. corporate community
Community: a term so overused and heavily co-opted by corporate entities that its usage can feel as blandly insincere as the politician’s platitude “thoughts and prayers”. The word community can be traced back to its Latin roots, commūnitās (“An unstructured community in which people are equal”) and commūnis ("common, public") . Appropriately, many definitions of “community” include the word common: “having something in common”, “common interest”, and “common ownership.” In its original sense, community can be understood as a group of people with shared experiences, shared goals, or shared resources.
I resent the loss of meaning that results from such gratuitous usage of the word in its corporate circulation, because I genuinely care about and need community, IRL. I want to be an active participant, contributing to something bigger than myself (not just a passive consumer). I also want reciprocity. I need people to show up for me, as I show up for others. I’m not a billionaire with a bunker. As WeWork, AirBnb, and CitiBike have appropriated the cultural spaces of the kibbutz, couch surfing, and free bike shares, larger society grows accustomed to corporations facilitating access to communal resources (and a packaged idea of community). Amazon can deliver your book today, so why bother with a local library? We become reliant on convenience and are relieved from the social awkwardness of interaction with strangers. The creative muscles that we might use to organize shared resources risk atrophy.
When I Google “The Commons” I would love to see the origins of the concept, but instead I find a coworking space on the Upper East Side with no commitment required and “20% OFF Dedicated Desks for the first three months.”
Widespread public usage does not a community make. Big Tech’s opaque corporate censorship policies are called “community standards”—with little information regarding what the standards are, when the community agreed upon them, or who is even included in that community. Common interest and common ownership, so central to the original understanding of community, were never established in Web 2.0, so of course they never had the chance to be protected.
When I Google “The Commons” I would love to see the origins of the concept, but instead I find a coworking space on the Upper East Side with no commitment required and “20% OFF Dedicated Desks for the first three months.” In the current Web space, “shared resources” are predominantly a romantic notion used to increase profit.
B. On Facebook and isolation
In October 2016, as part of the wave of responses to Kelly Oxford’s “Women: tweet me your first assaults”, I decided to post on Facebook. I shared my personal experience as a survivor and as a friend of several survivors. I had a lot of anxiety. The part of me that values the intimacy of one-on-one exchanges gets very anxious “sharing” into the social media abyss. Sharing indicates a two way street; it seems as though at least there should be someone there to receive.
Sharing to whom? Sharing for whom?
My post wasn’t a smiling selfie and didn’t have the language that algorithms pushed to the top of your feed. My anxiety was followed by an anti-climatic realization: friends and family members whose reactions I anticipated (and feared dealing with) had not received the memo. I felt relief, combined with frustration and alienation. I had to ask a friend if she had seen the post and then tell her to read it, as if explaining a failed joke. A new haircut the week before received a much larger show of support.
If the people who matter to me IRL don’t see my attempts to open a piece of my most vulnerable self, where was my “community” when I needed it? It felt worse to out myself as a survivor, only to hear crickets. Part of dealing with survivorship is about being seen, heard, and counted. If the algorithm dismisses me, it further minimizes my experience. If “sharing” on social media leads to further isolation, then why bother?
If the people who matter to me IRL don’t see my attempts to open a piece of my most vulnerable self, where was my “community” when I needed it?
Social media can make you feel huge or totally invisible, deeply connected or terribly alone. I started to wonder what value this particular platform had to me, if any. I clearly didn’t seem to matter there.
C. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and 10 years of labor
In 2017, I stopped posting on Facebook and invited friends to unfriend me there, with the intention of prioritizing real life friendship. I kept my account, but started to think of it as an archive rather than an active place to engage.
Following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, I learned that my data had been breached and I decided to return to Facebook to download my data and see what was accessed. I was surprised to see over a decade of my information organized into categories and output as PDF documents:
- 526 pages of Timeline data
- 104 pages of Event data (with the GPS coordinates of the location where I was when I posted an event)
- 35 pages of security login data
- 32 pages of phone numbers from my iPhone
- 18 pages of Friends data
- 5 pages of ads history
I was most surprised to see the passive accumulation of data. While I had not actively used Facebook in over a year, other people’s actions all accumulated to be part of my data: interactions on my timeline, friend requests, and invitations to events that I never responded to.
After helping a few people download their data, I offered to purchase it at the same rate paid by Cambridge Analytica: 75 cents each. I had a couple takers.
Fascinated by this, I thought other people might also want to see their data and potentially delete their profiles. In hopes of combating the fear of leaving this social media addiction, I decided to make it fun, hosting a data download party, where people could be in real life community, receive tech support (from yours truly), drink themed cocktails (“Move Fast and Break Things”) and watch the Zuckerberg Congressional Testimony while playing Facebook bingo (acknowledging how predictable the whole circus was). I hoped that the temporary formation of an in-person community could soften the potential loss of the online “imagined” community—if people would even consider taking that next step.
After helping a few people download their data, I offered to purchase it at the same rate paid by Cambridge Analytica: 75 cents each. I had a couple takers.
D. An internet of the Commons (In defense of the poor internet)
Intentions matter. The beginning of a new relationship has a great influence on how that relationship plays out. With the future of the Web, I’m less excited about my avatar attending business meetings in AR than I am about the possibility of a Craigslist-inspired Web 3.0. Not so much for the aesthetics or functionality, but for the reliability and the ethos. Access, affordability, openness. Straightforward. No mystery. No data extraction. A Web that is understandable rather than one where you are constantly wondering: Who decided it should work like this? How can I trick the system to get what I need?
My hope for the future of the Web is that when we find something isn’t working for us, we can roll down the window and toss it to the pavement.
I vote for a Web that evolves more slowly, with less frequent updates in favor of more privacy and transparency. More fact checking. Accountability that feels more like real life accountability, where a public reckoning might lead to different behavior in the future. A Web where sharing isn’t dependent on an algorithm deciding if there is value, where the Friends receiving your messages aren’t interrupted by a gatekeeper. A new model is needed to support a space that serves many and is not driven by profit. Can we imagine platforms that are never allowed to go public on the stock exchange?
For a true feeling of community in this new space, we need a Web that works for, with, and by a diverse group of people, not just the ones that currently build, manage, and maintain the space. After a rough day at work a few years ago, I remember googling “best new female comedians” hoping to find someone to make me laugh on the long bus ride home. The search results returned nine men and one woman. I wanted to throw my phone out the window, but I was trapped in the hermetically sealed plexi-space of a Greyhound. Often the Web is presented to the public in this way: moving ahead, with little creativity and a deterministic inevitability that offers no way out. My hope for the future of the Web is that when we find something isn’t working for us, we can roll down the window and toss it to the pavement.
Christina Freeman (she/her) is an artist and curator based in NYC. Her conceptual practice includes photography, video, artists’ books, multimedia installation, and performance. Her participatory installation, UltraViolet Archive was exhibited in the Queens International 2018: Volumes (Queens Museum), with mentions in Artforum and Vulture. She was a 2022 Bronx Museum AIM Fellow and her projects have received support from Creative Time (2019), Culture Push (2018-2019), National Coalition Against Censorship (2018-2019), Danish Arts Foundation (2018), and Red House, Sofia, Bulgaria (2012). Previous residencies: ARoS Public, Aarhus, Denmark; Flux Factory, Queens, NY; and SOMA, Mexico City. As part of ABC No Rio's Visual Arts Collective, Christina organizes exhibitions in noncommercial spaces in NYC. Freeman teaches at Hunter College, CUNY for the Department of Art & Art History and the Department of Film & Media. More at christinafreeman.net and @freeman_christina.