My name is Stephen McGregor, and this is my website. It’s a place where I can talk about the projects I’m working on and the things I care about. The idea is that I can do this here on my own terms, structured in a way that works for what I’m trying to say.
The proliferation of social media has meant an explosion in who can participate in an active way in the digital sphere. In a way, this is great. Pretty much anyone, regardless of technical knowledge, can sign up to a social media platform and start letting the rest of the world know who they are and what they think. But I have at least two problems with the current state of interactive media that are available to typical users of the web.
The first problem is that mainstream social media platforms inhibit the ways in which we’re able to express ourselves. This is a natural outcome of the templated nature of these platforms, each with their specific formats for content delivery and commentary. It means that users know how to find their way around and what to expect on any given platform, and while this might extend usability to a more people, one consequence of these expectations being inherently managed by platform providers is that there is an enforcement of implicit standards in terms of what type of content is considered acceptable and promotable, enacted through a combination of service agreement policies and policing-through-shame. Abiding by not-quite-explicit rules on how to behave that come from the top down means that on these platforms we are inclined to present certain versions of ourselves that create a de facto trawl net of mineable data on all of us. So it goes - but does it have to?
The second problem is that these platforms have absolute control over the way in which we can discover one another. It’s no big secret that algorithms are used not only to link from queries to digital content, but to promote specific content in the context of interpretations of queries: tech companies get to decide what you see based on who they think you are, generally for their own profit. As a result, the web isn’t really an arena for the open exchange of ideas or a place where anyone can come present themselves to the world. There is a great deal of discussion about the entitlements and boundaries of free speech in the world these days, but much less talk of the problem of who actually gets to be heard when they speak. Is it really enough to say that we have access to a platform for expressing ourselves, when there is no guarantee that the platform will make our expressions available in a fair way?
Having my own website is a pretty good solution to the first problem. I decide what goes on here, and how to link it all together into a structured site. I can also use this site for hosting live and interactive projects I’m working on, and I can weave together the different threads of my life - my professional work, my worldview, the things I get excited about - into what I hope will come across as a story with some coherency.
This website isn’t such a great solution to the second problem. If people are going to discover what my page and my life are all aobut, that discovery is in all likelihood still going to be mitigated algorithmically, according to the constraints determined by a company offering software designed to bend people’s behaviour towards ends that might be consumerist or might be ideological but almost certainly don’t have much to do with my own goals in sharing these pages with the world. I’m only semi-cynical about this; I think search providers are partly motivated to provide a fairly comprehensive registry of the web at large, and to offer users a chance to find exactly what they’re looking for within that registry. But I’m also realistic about the way that providing inclusive access to the web is essentially a screen for pushing content that is profitable and fundamentally manipulative.
What would it be like to have a world where everyone has their own personal website, tailored to broadcast them to the rest of planet in just the way they see fit? This is something that could, in principle, be facilitated by AI. One of the great successes of AI has been in making code writing more accessible to everyone, meaning that the task of framing our content in bespoke ways is now also more accessible (I do write lots of my own code, but I’m not a good web developer and I use AI to help with the structure of this website… maybe you can tell). One of the more ambgious outcomes of AI is the generation of content which is in the first place less personal, less meant and felt by another human, and so content that inevitably tends to return towards some kind of mean, a generic mode of expression. For what it’s worth, I don’t use AI to produce content, but I also don’t have an absolute problem with people who do; I think there’s a version of the application of this technology that could give people who have struggled to be heard a way of broadcasting their voices.
One of the things I worry about most of all with AI is the way that it can come between us. In addition to being an aide in building the structures that frame our content and also a generator of content, AI is increasingly a consumer of content. I don’t have a big problem with AI accessing my own content here and using it for training or analysis (I’m also not justifying the way that AI is trained on work created by people who do have a problem with that). What I do have a problem with is the idea that, as time passes, my own attempt to express myself will be directly encountered by other humans less frequently, and will be increasingly mitigated by modes of interpretation and translation that will, like with AI content production, always be returning towards an approximation that skews it towards the middle of the distribution of what people have to say.