* Lawrence Lessig’s https://lessig.tumblr.com/post/56888930628/on-the-emptiness-in-the-concept-of-neutrality
* Ben Werdmüller’s https://werd.io/2025/building-an-open-web-that-protects-us-from-harm
Two points of connection:
1. Neutrality in ethical or policy matters is insufficient, empty, and cowardly. Especially when you know better, neutrality in action is not ethical, it is negligent and wrong, like a lie of omission.
“Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.” — @werd.io (@ben@werd.social)
“… there are obviously plenty of contexts in which to be ‘neutral’ is simply to be wrong. ” @lessig.org (@lessig.tumblr.com @lessig@mastodon.world @lessig)
2. Building community for collective action is required for resilient resistance
Aaron helped inspire and drive numerous acts of resistance against foes better funded and connected, many acts which succeeded to some degree or completely such as preventing the passage of SOPA.¹
Similarly he built community for collective action, such as co-founding the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the Demand Progress political advocacy group² which remain active to this day.
One of the best ways to honor Aaron’s memory is to build on the good examples he set that succeeded and continue to succeed.
The only neutrality that Aaron supported was net neutrality, prioritizing those that use the internet over those that build & serve it, a priority of constituencies strongly aligned with the W3C’s official Ethical Web Principles.³
If you too reject neutrality and instead embrace allyship & action, some of those actions will require resisting the status quo with the intent of changing it.
If resistance with the goal of actual change is your primary objective (rather than recognition), build community to bring about that change, resist collectively not alone, both in the near term, and sustainably into the future.
Still miss you Aaron.
Previously:
* https://tantek.com/2024/013/t1/remembering-aaronsw-eleven-years (links to prior posts)
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the_Stop_Online_Piracy_Act_(SOPA)
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Progressive_Change_Campaign_Committee
³ https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#noharm
Okay this GDQ joke speedrun of a TI-83 game is sending me.
What fits your definition of a pillow during eternal Caturday?
Recent events online have been truly sucky, but as always the one shining light has been the #openweb (and by extension, the #fediverse—run by independent operators of course).
Virtually everything I hate, hate about the modern Internet has less to do with the design and featureset of the Web technically-speaking and much more to do with the fact that increasingly people are only accessing a mere handful of domain names as filtered through a mere handful of apps. I’ll go a step further: even while online spaces dominated by Big Tech slide further into hellscape territory, it’s never been easier for plucky individuals to build amazing experiences for the Web. The capabilities of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a plethora of cheap/free hosting options are so incredible today, my brain would have melted 10 years ago—certainly 20 years ago—if I’d been shown this kind of raw power.
And therein lies the disconnect…never before has The Indie Web been such a glorious platform for building anything you might dream of and sharing it with anyone you like, yet never before has The Corporate Web been so awful and damaging to the body politic.
I wish I knew how to deal with this cognitive dissonance, and how to convey to mere mortals out there that The Indie Web is alive and kicking and that The Corporate Web doesn’t have to define their experience of being online. This seems to be the challenge of 2025, and not a single day goes by when I don’t think deeply about this problem. It’s mentally and emotionally taxing—but again, I’m grateful to know there are others out there in the same boat. We’ve got our work cut out for us, that’s for sure!
Finally deleted my Facebook (and Instagram and Messenger) accounts. It hurts to feel like I’m cutting off one of the few ways to find and be found by long-time family and friends, but I just cannot be part of these so-called social networks anymore.
Y’all can follow me on my website and places I can still syndicate like Mastodon and Bluesky. You can also converse with me via email, Signal, or IRL.
Weird to feel seen by Bruce Sterling!
Some Public Limits of Everyday Weirdness (2025)
hat-tip: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#linkdump
I’m trying out the Pomodoro Technique for the first time in a while. I’m using tomatoi.st for the timers. It works pretty well, though doesn’t seem to keep track of which break length you should take next. That’s minor, though.
