We’ve designed systems not really well anticipating the kind of users that would really use them, thinking that they would—or maybe not even thinking—that they would be used in the same way that they were in the 1980s and 1990s.
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The main fear I have, and I believe most of my colleagues have, is to see the Internet more fragmented than it is, and much more fragmented than we wanted it to be. When we designed it, we developed technology which was due to be open, which means that everyone knows the technology, everyone can develop it, and everyone can improve it as well.
Citizenship, after not thinking about it for a while, feels like something we’re all thinking about quite a lot these days. In the words of Hannah Arendt, citizenship is the right to have rights. All of your rights essentially descend from your citizenship, because only countries will protect those rights.
I wonder with all these varying levels of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives digitally and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a public network?