Solid Hope? Schemata As Democratic Project

• In Event: Schemas, Graphs, Ontologies - III

Abstract

Web technologies are not new; even the new technologies are frequently remediations. If they are not remediation, then they are likely transformations and/or remixes of remediations. There is a dialectic between technological hope and technological progress. For a long time, the web was thought to be predominantly democratic, and then the rise of platforms recentralized and realized the web's nature as bureaucratic constructs and its worst crowd mentalities of bullying, harassment, etc.

Solid is a new technological schematic built promoted by Tim Berners-Lee amongst others. It promises to transform the centralized web in which platforms and corporations have control of your data because you have to give it to them in order to use their systems. It does this by attaching all user data to the user through the use of unique identifiers and the encoding and use of the user's data only with their permission. The transformation of this model is meant to be fundamental to the empowerment of users in the face of platform corporations. This idea of empowerment embodies technological hope. Technological hope embodies a particular politics of hope, one centered around objects and solutions to problems based on those objects. Most of the problems of the www that are being solved with Solid technologies are not technological problems though. Much like climate change, the technology allows the problem to develop, but the problems of climate change and the internet are social and economic problems. The problems of the internet and internet-data as being resolved by Solid center around constructions of property, identity, and organization of social relations in a profit-oriented world. The new read-write web is supposed to help us solve this by operationalizing the fragmentation of data, much as Ulrich Beck describes individualization operationalizing the fragmentation of society.
The same techniques that Solid and a future web will operationalize are technical solutions to social problems that I argue cannot be solved by technology alone. This paper analyzes the technological hopes embodied in Solid's schema and confronts them with the hopes of past technologies and the technological progress that they made. It attempts to show the assumptions of the hope are not realizable, much like democratic hopes were unrealizable on the internet in general. In showing these internal contradictions, I conclude with a path forward through the dialectic that may at least be a point of resistance, or point of action.

Author

• Jeremy Hunsinger, Wilfrid Laurier University