# Toxicity and Commons

An open source platform, available to a wide range of people holding various beliefs and values, runs the risk at having its identity changed as it develops. Commercialization and growth of userbase can have detrimental effects on the software, changing the identity of a piece of commons from a unifying space open to all into a piece of “toxic” software.

This paper investigates the elements of how commons can become toxic with the specific angle of actor-network theory emphasizing how technological agents, such as scripts and algorithms, can shape and are shaped by human activity regarding the digital. The paper will do this by creating a commons prototype called “Global Garden” shaped by submitted data of users all over the world.

## What is the Global Garden?
Global Garden is an online “collage” of food recipes made with images and text posts submitted by users all over the world. Interactions with the posts, such as liking or commenting on them, would increase their size and make them more prominent as their popularity grows. There are also tags (#baking, #soup, #cake etc.) users can utilize to enhance their posts with specific themes.

The idea is to create a network of recipes that are publicly available to everyone and which generates a “heatmap” based on the geographical location where the post was made. The data being uploaded comes to represent the region the user is from in a culinary manner, showing the types of recipes most popular in regions all around the world.

## Toxic Communities and Software
Toxicity, in the case of this study, refers to themes of being volatile, invasive, and destructive, and it is always a possibility when it comes to online platforms, and commons is no exception. Any platform that is open, presents itself as free and public, and allows users to create or post close to whatever they want is at risk of becoming toxic. Extremist groups flock to areas where they can congregate under the banner of “free speech” while promoting radical and sometimes hateful ideas (Mansoux 2020, 127-128). This has been seen with online forums like Reddit, where a single individual can create multiple accounts, even after they have been banned, and interact with specific content in order to get it more attention than it would otherwise. Even something as uncontroversial and apolitical as a recipe sharing site could potentially fall victim to this type of community toxicity if users were given completely free reign of the site.

The extent of this toxicity is heavily based in what the site allows when it comes to interaction with the posts. For instance, a cookie recipe featuring lettered frosting spelling out a political statement could get ample support from the people agreeing with that ideology, while getting hate from the people who oppose it. The comment section would be rife with arguments and the amount of interactions with the recipe would explode, making the site’s algorithm believe that the recipe deserves more attention than others of its kind, thereby featuring it more and making it one of the first things a new user sees when they use the Global Garden. In the same way, this popularity-based algorithm could be abused by members of extremist groups bombarding specific posts with interactions in order to get them more attention. To combat these things, the question of code neutrality comes up. If the Global Garden decides to ban certain talking points, it will alienate certain groups of people and remove part of the openness that was its initial appeal (Mansoux 2020, 131-132). Even something as perceivably innocent as an online recipe collection can become politically charged, and then perhaps spiral into becoming toxic as a result if the code allows for it. The functionality of the Global Garden and the openness it allows is formed by the policies, algorithms, and scripts that form the site. These form a certain type of utilization that shape how users interact with the site. In turn, these policies, algorithms, and scripts are shaped by the way the users interact with them (Latour 2005).

It isn’t just the community of users that are susceptible to toxicity. The software itself can become “toxic” if the fundamentals of its structure become skewed in favor of corporations over the userbase and community. Even though the Global Garden can be perceived as an innocent bit of software, its geo-location features make it vulnerable to the market and predatory corporations who see it as a potential means of creating profit. If a corporation were to take over the Global Garden, that corporation could use the site’s policies, algorithms, and scripts to push its own agenda in order to sell specific products or political ideas to the site’s userbase (Mansoux 2020, 128-129). This can be avoided by not selling the data gathered by the Global Garden to any corporations, but because of operating costs the site must have some sort of income in order to stay running. This implies a situation where the toxicity of commons is a matter of degree, not category. In order to stay operational and functional, will a piece of commons *have* to have some toxic elements in its design?

#### Literature
Latour, Bruno. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mansoux, Aymeric & Abbing, Roel R. (2020). “Seven Theses on The Fediverse and The Becoming of FLOSS” in Gansing, K & Luchs, I (eds) The Eternal Network, Institute of network cultures & transmediale/art&digitalculture.