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An essay by Vytas Jankauskas, published in autumn 2022.
Vytas is an artist, designer, and researcher. His practice encompasses technology and the domestic space, the âinternet of things,â data ownership, social media, and their intimate impact on our everyday lives. From 2019 to 2021, Vytas was the Head of Research and Creation at the Chronus Art Center Lab, Shanghai. In 2021, he was also Adjunct Faculty at NYU ITP, Tisch School of the Arts.
Itâs a hot and suffocatingly humid Mediterranean summer evening, and everyone besides me, *le professeur*, and my sidekick, *le cameraman*, has been talking about food for five straight hours. A small group of locals has come together to test the first prototype of [Food Food](<https://laplateformeinnovationlab.notion.site/Food-Food-c0ba243931384bf6b62813bbff9a76ac>), a social network for neighborhood foodies. My favorite dishes on this sweltering night are cold strawberry gazpacho with freshly torn mint and a mango salad with tongue-neutralizing Sichuan pepper. The damp air, sweet fruit, and signature sourness of the spice briefly transport me back to China, where I lived for three years before moving here to Marseille. I escape into vivid daydreams against a background of humming cicadas and passionate conversations I canât contribute to. [Food Food](<https://laplateformeinnovationlab.notion.site/Food-Food-c0ba243931384bf6b62813bbff9a76ac>) is a community I both admire and feel mildly intimidated by. *Le cameraman* makes silly jokes about how all this nutritious food will make his skin glow tomorrow, after having eaten pasta for a month. Tonight, we both are welcome, and yet we feel we donât belong.
Ethan Zuckerman, who studies social networks, says that sometimes assembling communities who have little in common doesnât make much sense. Historically, humans formed groups around specific interests, whether that be activism, religious beliefs, or playing pĂ©tanque while sharing a bottle of pastis. Traditional institutions have struggled to make change in Marseille, the second-largest city in France and among the poorest in Europe. Instead, it's held together by small, independent citizen networks, each nurturing its own niche. Around 16,000 functioning associationsâ ranging from refugee centers to Olympique de Marseille fan clubs, from hip-hop schools to artist collectives â constitute a complex, organic mesh of interdependent urban ecologies.
Meanwhile, almost in a parallel world, Marseille is the worldâs ninth most active hub for submarine internet cables, ranking after New York and before Hong Kong. Its newest tentacle, dubbed PEACE (Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe), stretches 12,000 kilometers to the Pakistani port of Gwadar, then turns into an internet superhighway running all the way to mainland China, part of its Digital Silk Road initiative. The Food Food test users are gathered tonight in no less than an aspiring European digital capital, their glowing phone screens attracting insects as they chat about buggy buttons and overly spicy chilis.
Marseille today reminds me of my hometown Kaunas, the second largest-city in Lithuania, a country which, around 2010, two decades after its independence from the Soviet Union, boasted the fastest internet in the world. At the time, to me, it meant fast and free downloads of pirated content via torrent, one of the most useful decentralized protocols to ever exist. We also hung out on Multiply, a social network that was popular among small groups of friends, and one.lt, the widely adopted paid Lithuanian social network founded in 2009, which later got knocked out by Facebook. The PC was the most expensive object in my home; we got it around 2006. Due to a widely circulating superstition that its power adapters could overheat, we put it in standby mode every few hours and my mother covered it with a crocheted throw to protect it from dust.
The internet created a reality of its own in Kaunas, which was still getting used to democracy and Western technologies when it was devastated by the 2008 economic crisis. At times, people were unable afford food, but had several digital TV contracts and a drawer full of early smartphones, the costs relatively low due to strong competition among service providers. It took me a while to grow up into a proper nerd and understand how intriguing my city was, a peculiar case study of cultural change brought about by connectivity on steroids, established very suddenly on top of nothing.
Now, I'm intrigued by Marseille. With its technological promise, highly unequal sociocultural profile, and diverse communities as pillars, the Mediterranean port city is uniquely interesting for experimenting with digital decentralization. The mainstream platforms donât belong here, just like I donât belong in Food Food.
An enthusiastic and ambitious addition to the cityâs technosocial scene, La Plateforme is an inclusive tech school, free for all. It's a second home to aspiring young developers, no matter their backgrounds or circumstances, no matter if they spend a night (or several) sleeping under my office desk. Aimed at tackling the cityâs high unemployment rates, the school is built on a philosophy of self-organization, manifested through vote-based curricula and peer-to-peer learning. Innovation Lab, now part of the school, opened in 2021, and launched its first array of interdisciplinary programs to look critically at everyday technologies and their near-future implications.
The Social Networks of Tomorrow program, in collaboration with Project Liberty, aims to build decentralized social networks for small communities. The goal of this lab is not to spam Marseillais with apps, but rather to reverse the usual process of brainstorming and âplatform-thinkingâ to instead look at potential use cases to understand if, when, and in what shape the distributed web could materialize. The insights will inform Project Libertyâs development of its Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) and the upcoming Frequency social network, by opening up new perspectives on functionality, trust, and governance.
The programâs small first cohort met with several local communities and tried to understand how they use mainstream social media. Participants then went on to build relationships with a community of their choosing, observing everyday interactions to identify their needs. Finally, they envisioned and built prototypes for small-scale, community-oriented social networks.
Our early discussions with community members revealed how alienating the Web3 vocabulary can be. Terms like tokenization, stakes, DAOs, and DeFis are still unfamiliar to many people; ideological distinctions between Web3, dWeb, and Distributed Web, as explained by Mai Ishikawa Sutton (Logic, Issue 13, pp. 113-130), add to the complexity. Even the students were confused by the many definitions. Building good software isnât easy, but ensuring technologies are consciously appropriated by people making informed choices is even harder. Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty describe how âlimiting access to conceptual tools and technical platforms often limits the radical potential of decentralized initiativesâ like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and how âpeople whose lives DAOs could most affect would have no opportunity to shape its developmentâ (Radical Friends, p. 33).