No notifications, no possibility to follow someone or ask for friendship, no functionality to exchange messages. No incentive, hidden or obvious, to stay on the platform longer than you would like, or to leverage human instincts to get emotional reactions, interactions, engagement. And, above all, a limited number, unchanging over time, of posts that we can publish: 100 each. In short, the opposite of everything we are used to thinking when we think of a social network.
Is called Minus and it is the latest work by Ben Grosser, an artist, programmer and professor who has devoted himself to the social, cultural and political effects of software for a long time.
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That of a social network designed for non engulfing an ideally infinite amount of our time, our attention and our data is an idea so alien to the way mainstream platforms are designed – whether it’s Facebook or Instagram, Twitter or TikTok it doesn’t matter – that it initially leaves us shaken. In light of the flood of news about how large Silicon Valley companies systematically ignore the well-being and safety of their users to maximize the time we spend on their platforms and, consequently, the data on our behaviors and interests that we provide to them, however. , Minus it becomes both a critique of the status quo and an experiment that asks us to imagine what a different Internet could look like.
“The infrastructure for the World Wide Web was built as a public infrastructure, and many people initially accessed the network through universities and public libraries. Then came the 2000s, and Silicon Valley began developing a platform approach to the Internet. Instead of having, as before, all the individual websites and blogs, we started bringing them all to individual platforms and keeping them closed there: this is what Facebook does, for example, ”Grosser tells Italian Tech. “And now the problem is it’s all centralized, it’s all private. We have individual human beings, like Mark Zuckerberg, who are literally in control of the world experience of 3 billion human beings. What we need, in my opinion, is to return to the public while maintaining what has led services like Facebook to have 3 billion users: the opportunity for people to connect ”.
Minus, then, was created to highlight all the distortions of the platforms that currently monopolize the digital space – and our time. “Those in Silicon Valley are platforms designed to be addictive and attract as much attention as possible, to continue capitalizing on your data. Their goal is to grow as much as possible: it is the quintessence of Silicon Valley culture ”, explains Grosser, who over the years has developed several projects to denounce the hunger for growth of large tech companies from a position of explicit anti-capitalist criticism.
“I thought it was important to build radical alternatives to rethink what it means to be social online. Silicon Valley has normalized this idea that everything must be measured, that you cannot have a feed without algorithms that decide what we see at all times, that everything must be immediate and fast. But what would happen if we invert these values and use them as a basis to reflect on what it means to be connected? ”, The artist asked.
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The result was Minus, “A platform you can’t use forever” – where the ability to publish your thoughts is literally limited, and there is no incentive to do something if you don’t want to. “We have become conditioned to continually curate our image and to think that we will have to look after our appearance and our presence on these platforms forever. We have to post content every day, many times a day or several times a week, otherwise your presence decreases. On MinusInstead, many people wrote that they feel comfortable because they realized that they could also forget it for days: it is not something that happens with Facebook or Instagram. Minus it does not ask that we do anything in particular. And it’s not something we’re used to. It is just a social network. Use your posts, don’t use your posts. Stay and really participate. Never come back. Everything will be fine, whatever you want to do ”.
Grosser doesn’t want to share the number of users they’ve signed up for Minus since it was launched two months ago, but says he is extremely pleased with the direction the project is taking. User responses vary: there are those who see the limit of 100 posts as a challenge and decide to finish them all in the shortest possible time – by posting more or less sensible things – and those who never end up publishing anything, jealously preserving the own one hundred posts for thoughts that are really worth sharing. Many share poems or haiku, others cannot accept the limitations of the platform and bombard the founder with ideas of how they would improve it if they were in charge.
Aside from a couple of quickly moderated cases, hate speech is virtually absent from Minus. “There are very few trolls, because hate speech doesn’t create the kind of reaction they would have on Twitter or Facebook,” explains Grosser. “So, since the person posting it isn’t, they don’t get that dopamine hit they normally get from likes or retweets, they don’t see notifications, and their post doesn’t resurface at the top of the feed if people interact with it, incentives to troll they are not here”. All there is is a white site, with a clean interface, and a lot of strangers posting in tons of different languages. By experiencing, together, an Internet different from that of today. One hundred posts at a time.
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