Thread · 5 tweets · 4 Dec 2022

I wish I could count the number of times people have told me "you can publish anything you want on the web, that shows it isn't captured!" The question was never "can you publish" but "who decides whether it gets seen?" *That* is what gatekeeping means.

On the web, we have two variants of a single category of gatekeepers: search and social. They look superficially different - one is pull, the other push - but that's just a UI detail. It's all algorithmic media exposed in slightly different ways.

Together, they have full editorial control over what is allowed to matter on the web. That their editorial decisions are automated doesn't make them any less editorial. That they may be personalised is just second-order editorialising.

We haven't faced this degree of gatekeeping in centuries, if ever. A tiny group of people decide what's relevant. You don't go to jail for disagreeing with their demands, you're just buried under the boosted signal from those who collaborate.

At the end of the day, this is incompatible of course with democracy, but also with human flourishing. If you're in tech, I think it's a good idea to consider if your mind is best used working on some this_is_fine.gif project or on fixing this.