hack politics by hacking technology

The Net is rushing into the mainstream, and Internet technologies are likely to define mass media for years to come. Given the influence of media on our political life, we are at a critical moment, one where we can hack politics by hacking technology- the right software changes here and there could have profound impacts on our culture.

The right change is to bring a little Usenet to the Web. New software could allow users to add comments to any web page. This won't matter much today, when the web is still on the fringes of communication. But it will matter tremendously when the web becomes a legitimate and important part of commercial mass media.

bring a little Usenet to the Web

In this paper, I describe how a web-commenting system might work and argue that it is technologically and economically viable. The system would store comments in an independent database, ensuring that any could be commented on without the involvement of the page's maintainer. A browser plug-in would provide an easy-to-use interface to create the impression of a seamless connection between web pages and the comments database. Software filters would sort comments for relevance and credibility.

One-way mass media have become an ever-more important force in our culture. We have a change to change that dramatically, by adding the capacity for large-scale many-to-many discussion to our next mass medium. This paper is divided into separate sections on the political importance of a commenting system, and its technical implemenation, but these elements are inseparable. Systems for web-comments are a polically critical. Their politics should not be left up to technological accident.

Everyone who cares about the future of the net has their own visions of what it might someday become. Here is what fueled my first fantasies of the future of a mainstream net: I remember watching TV after I'd first discovered the newsgroups. Everything I saw seemed to scream for a Usenet-style response. I watched an infomercial for a hundred-dollar machine that would let you do sit-ups and another selling five-dollar-a-minute psychic advice to people with financial troubles. I watched one-sided political "debates". I watched ad after ad and news story after news story, itching to read the follow-up article. There wasn't one. Seized by technological utopianism that was a little less embarrassing in '92, I imagined that some day the Net would merge with our TV sets, sit front and center in our living rooms, and transform broadcast media with many-to-many forums. Some day everything would be published on the Internet. You would have the option of reading what other people have said whenever you read a newspaper editorial, or a political speech, or an advertisement, and be able to add your own comments, too.

...as central to our lives as television is today.

Back then, the idea that someday everything would be published on the net was just a dream. Today, that dream is shared by entertainment conglomerates and technology juggernauts who are investing millions of dollars in making it come true. If they're right, the net's acceleration into the mainstream of media life will indeed continue until it is as central to our lives as television is today.

But the Worldwide Web has transformed what that dream might mean. Just a couple of years ago, when people said they read something on the Internet, they typically meant the Usenet groups. Now they mean the Web. This is a terrible shame. For all its wonders, the Web missed out on what was most exciting about the Usenet: The newsgroups offer something that has never existed on the scale in which they function: they are truly a many-to-many medium: You can respond to any message you read. And so can anyone else. Anyone with a threaded newsreader sees the responses immediately adjacent to the original post. You're accountable for everything you say on Usenet, and it's hard to get away with bullshitting.

There are mechanisms for response on the Web, of course. They're just not very good. You can put up a page responding to something you've seen, but will only be read by those who take conscious (and often difficult) steps to find it. There are lots of technologies that allow sites to include discussions on their pages, but the pages that most merit comment will are likely never to include them- neither lunatic fringe holocaust deniers nor mainstream corporate marketers are likely to take special steps to allow their claims to be refuted. On the Web, adding and finding comments is hard. On the Usenet, there's no way to create post in such a way that it cannot be responded to.

radio hackers could never have imagined network television. we cannot imagine what the web will be when it becomes big business.

So far, we have only seen the first tiny steps of the Web's transformation into a commercial mass medium. Early radio hackers building their own transmitters could never have imagined the evolution of broadcast toward licensed radio and then ad-supported network television. We are equally unable to imagine what will happen when the web becomes big business. A good guess, though, is that it will become more like the big business of previous media.

As the marketplace of ideas merges with the marketplace of money, attention goes those who can pay for it. The Opentext Web search engine may be giving us a taste of the net's future with their policy of giving higher rankings to sites willing (and able) to pay for the privilege, pushing underfunded ideas further and further down the list. Regardless of how it happens, well-funded corporate sites that can afford to publicize themselves heavily will do what they can to ensure that their ideas are broadly received. It was once the norm for web pages to link to whatever related material the maintainer could find online. Now links (and, thus, our attention) are bought and sold. Why would Time online link to a site that wasn't owned by Time-Warner or paid for by a sponsor? As web audiences grow larger, interest in affecting what they do and don't see will grow, and the politics and economies of that interest will be felt more strongly.

the point is not to provide a separate forum for discussion, the point is to consciously design our nascent media to include as many opinions as possible

There will always be forums for group communication online. But the point of a web commenting system is not to provide a separate forum for open discussion. The point is to weave discussion and debate as tightly as we can into the fabric of the Web, to consciously design our nascent media technologies to allow for as many opinions as possible. We can tweak the quality of open discussion at the fringes of the media. But the real challenge is to provide open discussion at the media's core. The Web is where increasingly large portions of our culture will proceed- It is where newspapers will (and already do) publish their articles, where advertisers will (and already do) make their pitches, where political rhetoric will be (and already is) published. Without the possibility of comment, the fact that they are on the net only makes them easier to find- they are as prone as always to the usual lies, half-truths, and biases.

We are used to thinking of the Web as a one-way medium. But it needn't stay that way. It would be possible to create a system that would allow anyone to add comments to any page on the Web, and retain the Internet's former promise of mainstream many-to-many media. It will always be possible for money to buy large audiences. It shouldn't be possible for money to buy the right to the last word.

This section isn't meant to be an argument for a single specific method of implementing web comments, nor is it a full technical specification for how web comments would work. I want to show that they can work, and to generate ideas about how they might be implemented in ways that would be sustainable. Most importantly, I want to define a set of goals for how a web-commenting system might look, if designed with the conscious political goals of transforming the web into a more level playing field for discourse and debate. The system meets the following goals: The system must provide an intuitive interface, and should make it as easy as possible to add comments and view all the comments that have been added to a given page. Since comments will often be controversial, they need to be maintained independently of the pages being commented upon. The system needs a filtering method to protect it from spamming. The system must be scalable enough to support very large volumes of postings without breaking down or becoming unrealistically expensive to maintain. It should be possible to implement the system without any infrastructural changes to the Web such as new servers or protocols.

Comments are stored in an independent database. A browser plug-in makes it easy to find, read and add comments to any page.

Basic Function A browser plug-in allows users to easily add and view comments on any web page. Comment information is stored independently of the pages being responded to, but the software creates the impression of a seamless connection. Adding Comments: A user sees a web page, and clicks a button on the browser to add a comment. A window appears, in which the comment text is entered. The browser software (or plug-in) adds a new record into the comments database. The first field in the record contains the url (or other unique identifier) of the page being commented upon. A second field contains a subject line. A third field contains the text of the comment. The database is indexed on the first field. (Note: This description simplifies what could well be a more complicated process- The comments database need not store the comments themselves. In a process invisible to the user, the text of the comments could be stored elsewhere- In a Usenet message, or in the public html directory of the user's ISP. The comments database would then only store the address of the comments, and the subject lines)

Viewing Comments: A viewer is browsing the Web with the browser's comments feature turned on. Each time the browser loads a new page, it looks up the address of that page in the comments database, and displays, in a separate pane, a list of comments that other users have added to the page. Users may choose to browse the Web with comments always visible, to browse without comments, or to specifically request the comments for a given page. The internal workings of the database are invisible to the user. These processes are handled by the browser/plug-in. From a users point of view, the comments and the pages being commented upon are seamlessly integrated, even though, form a technical perspective, they are stored on different servers.

W3C-Annot Issues of annotation are being discussed by the Annotation Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The focus of the group now seems to be firmly placed on providing distributed working groups tools through which to use the Web for collaboration- a notion called "annotation sets" would provide small-to-medium sized groups with tools for sharing web annotations.

FAQ: What's wrong with annotation sets?

ComMentor Like the W3C-annot proposal, ComMentor is a proposed system for annotation sets, and does not seem to allow for the possibility of seeing all the comments that have been added to a given page.

Web4Groups Web4Groups is an EU-funded project which includes the goal of adding discussion buttons to web pages. Information can be found on the Web4Groups Page and in Jacob Palme's paper Linking Conferences to Web Pages (available only as an Acrobat PDF file). Like the W3C-Annot group, Palme seems more concerned with providing better forums for group discussions than with challenging the authority of web publishers- he specifically includes, for instance, a tag to identify pages whose publishers do not want comments, and to prevent discussions from being added to those pages.

FAQ: Should people be allowed to keep comments off their pages?

Other technical sources A lot of the technological inspiration for this article comes from A Protocol for Scalable Group and Public Annotations by Daniel LaLiberte and Alan Braverman, both of the NCSA. LaLiberte and Braverman have set aside the plan in favour of the Annotations Sets idea proposed by W3C-Annot. I've also taken many ideas about how annotations might work from Wayne Gramlich's page of annotation issues. The idea of using a distributed, Usenet-like database for making annotations public was originally proposed by Marc Andreesen in 1993. Times have changed. Backlinks There's a loose online network of people on the web interested in backlinks: a technology to allow users to find all the pages that link to a given page. The goal, for some proponents at least, is to make it easy to find criticisms of web documents. Collaborative Filtering The proposed method for correlating user-ratings on comments to provide personalized ratings is called Collaborative Filtering. GroupLens is a project for using this technology to help filter Usenet. To see collaborative filtering in action, visit The Movie Critic site, which uses it to recommend movies, or FireFly, which uses if for movies and music. Hal Varian maintains a very complete list of related resources. Visions of hypertext: History Ted Nelson's famously (over)ambitious Xanadu Project is the earliest vision of global digital hypermedia. A very grand vision, it includes the idea of , which would make it possible to add criticisms to a document. Earlier roots of hypertext vision can be found in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Back to CyberFAX