What Is The Web?

Theseus is pretty much the standard hero we've come to expect from the Greek Cinematic Universe. He is conceived after a cryptically on-brand pronouncement from the Oracle of Delphi leads Princess Æthra to become simultaneously impregnated by both King Ægeus of Athens and Poseidon, but he then grows up with neither of his dads in the picture much. As a young man, upon discovering his ancestry, he decides to travel to Athens to claim his kingly birthright. But instead of going the safe way — by sea — he instead chooses the land path that takes him past no fewer than six openings of the Underworld, because #YOLO. Long story short: he makes it, and goes on to enjoy the delights of Athenian family life as his stepmom tries to kill him twice, then his cousins try to kill him again, and later his (human) dad jumps off a cliff because he forgot to use white sails instead of black on his ship.

Sail color aside, that ship is what I want to talk about here. Theseus sailed it back from Crete where he had just slain the Minotaur, escaped the Labyrinth, saved the children of Athens, and abandoned Ariadne like a threadbare sock. The Athenians were so thankful to get their children back that every year afterwards they commemorated the event by taking that ship on a pilgrimage. Whenever one of the ship's planks would (inescapably) rot, they would replace it with new timber; and they kept doing for long enough that eventually every one of the ship's planks and all of its parts were replaced by newer ones.

This is the Ship of Theseus thought experiment which has been keeping philosophers employed for centuries: if every component of the ship was replaced one by one over time, is the resulting ship the same as the initial one?

The Web is the same. HTTP/3 is a binary multiplexed UDP protocol, HTTP/0.9 was just text over TCP (and it didn't even have headers or response codes, it could only transmit HTML). We used to show off just how good we were at making intricate 800x600 layouts with nested tables and transparent pixels, in ways that would get you laughed out of the room by today's responsive subgrid crowd. People hated XHTML so much that they all flocked to JSX. Flash used to be universal and has vanished; SVG used to be niche and is now banal. You would get in trouble for touching a color outside of the 216 websafe palette but eval and document.write were rad. We wrote Perl. We wrote PHP. Some wrote CFML and Java applets. We wrote VBScript in the browser. Firefox extensions ran on RDF, as did some feed syntaxes, at least on one of those happy weeks when you could find two people who agreed about a feed syntax. We had addresses, then URLs, then URIs, then IRIs, and then URLs again. A few things have stuck around throughout, but you'll have a hard time making the case that they define the Web.

But if we can replace all the parts and still call it the Web, how can we explain what the Web is? I don't really care that much about some mythological dude's boat, but if we want to build the Web together then we need to agree about what the Web is, what it is not, and where it is that we should be taking it next. Proceeding via small, incremental changes to what we currently have is a healthy and laudable approach, but it helps to have a sense for what it is that those small steps are supposed to be incrementing towards. After all, a headless chicken takes it one step at a time as well.

User Agency

Rather than try to define the Web as a bundle of technologies without a clear criterion to establish their coherence and evolution, I believe that the Web is a principled project that is defined in terms of its values and ends rather than its methods and means. Stated more explicitly:

The Web is the set of digital networked technologies that work to increase user agency.

Defining the Web as an ethical project might not prove universally popular. As technologists we are often reluctant to engage with philosophy, a reluctance often expressed by running in the opposite direction all limbs akimbo with an ululating shriek reminiscent of some of the less harmonious works of exorcism. Even those of us who are curious about philosophy rarely seem to let it influence what and how we build. But there are very good reasons to take the time to align on what it is that we're trying to build when we build the Web, and good reasons why this has to import at least a little bit of conceptual engineering from the vast and alien lands of philosophy.

First, people who claim not to practice any philosophical inspection of their actions are just sleepwalking someone else's philosophy. Keynes said it best:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
― John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Second, in the same way that the more abstract forms of computer science can indeed help us produce better architectures, philosophy can (and should) be applied to the creation of better technology. A quick tour of the biggest problems that we face in tech — governance, sovereignty, speech, epistemic individualism, gatekeeping, user agency, privacy, trust, community — reads like a syllabus for the toughest course in ethics and political philosophy. There is no useful future for the Web that doesn't wrestle with harder problems and social externalities. "Ethics and technology are connected because technologies invite or afford specific patterns of thought, behaviour, and valuing: they open up new possibilities for human action and foreclose or obscure others." (Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues) Technology choices, from low-level infrastructure all the way to the UI, decide what is made salient or silent, hard or easy. They shape what is possible and therefore what people can so much as even think about acting on or about holding one another accountable for.

Third, we have a loose, vernacular notion that we are doing this "for the user" and this is captured in key architectual documents as the Priority of Constituencies, but we could benefit from being a bit more precise about what we mean by "putting users first". As I will argue below, the idea of user agency ties well the capabilities approach, an approach to ethics and human welfare that is concrete, focused on real, pragmatic improvements, and that has been designed to operate at scale.

Overall, if we're going to work out how best to develop user agency it seems useful to agree on some basic notions of what we as technologists can do for our users, what capabilities most empower our user, and how to ensure that a focus on user agency is a central, sustainable, and capture-resistant component of our technological practice. Three things that are important to share some minimal foundations about are:

1. working towards ethical outcomes doesn't mean relying on vapid grand principles but rather ought to be focused on concrete recommendations;
2. when considering agency we need to be thinking about real agency rather than theoretical freedoms; and
3. counterintuitively, giving people greater agency sometimes means making decisions for them, and that's okay if it's done properly.

Let's look at these three points in turn.

Capabilities

We're all familiar with "vaporware freedoms", when you are given a nominal right to do something but the world is architected in such a way to effectively prevent the exercise of that right. Everyone can start a business or own a house! — except no bank exists that will lend to people like you. Users can change the default as much as they want to! — except you know that they won't because the UI makes it prohibitively cumbersome and laborious. Everyone can speak! — except only certain voices get amplified, a vaporware freedom which Rogers Brubaker has captured as: "Gatekeepers may no longer control what gets published, but algorithms control what gets circulated."

Boosted by pervasive surveillance that enables nudging at scale by an arsenal of deceptive patterns, vaporware freedoms are clearly thriving in our digital environment, but they aren't new. Global economic development struggled for decades with comparable issues in response to which Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen developed a pragmatic understanding of quality-of-life and social justice known as the capabilities approach.

The capabilities approach asks "What each person is able to do and to be?" (Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities). It replaces know-it-all, command-and-control, top-down approaches that create dependence on external aid, ignore local knowledge, and destroy local initiatives. Instead, it supports an unfailing commitment to people's ability to solve their own problems if not prevented from doing so:

With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help each other. They need not be seen primarily as passive recipients of the benefits of cunning development programs. There is indeed a strong rationale for recognizing the positive role of free and sustainable agency — and even of constructive impatience.
— Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

What capabilities translate to in technical terms for those of us who want user agency is a complex, multipronged project, many parts of which we still need to design and assemble. One important architectural aspect is the need to remove external authority from the system so as to prevent chokepoints of capture from emerging, and replacing it with what Jay Graber aptly described as "user-generated authority, enabled by self-certifying web protocols."

User authority doesn't mean that people have to build their own thing. Not everyone can run their own server for the same reason that not everyone can eat exclusively from their own pet organic garden. Not all control is agency; control has to be proportionate to bounded rationality and reasonable cost (including in time) and people have to be supported by powerful infrastructure that does not lock them into any system. More than anything, their interactions with a digital space have to be self-directed — no one needs to hand their life over to Clippy.

Capabilities were designed with development in mind: they are meant to change people's actual lives, not to check theoretical items off a list. They are by nature concrete and implementable. The capabilities framework is a great building block for a Web understood as furthering user agency because, in many ways, capabilities are user agency.

Ethics in the Trenches

If you've read Web (and other) standards, you're at least superficially familiar with RFC2119 ("Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels") which is famous for defining such terms as MUST or SHOULD NOT. But one of the documents that I rank among the highest to have been published by the IETF in its nearly-forty-year history is its companion RFC6919 ("Further Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels"), published April 1st 2013, which standardizes far more versatile terms like MIGHT, COULD, SHOULD CONSIDER, or the barn-burning MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T).

Altogether too often, ethical guidance can feel like it was written against RFC6919 instead of RFC 2119. This can be particularly true of ethical tech documents. These seem to mostly be lists of lofty principles that exude a musty scent of meeting room detergent and commit to all manners of good behavior requirements that the legal department is confident you can safely ignore. Picking an ethical principle as the foundation and defining objective of the Web is unlikely to help anyone if it's nothing more than a MAY WISH TO.

Nothing says that it has to be this way. Focusing on user agency and on user-centric ethics generally doesn't mean that we should get lost in reams of endless abstraction. On the contrary: it means that we must focus on principles that can be implemented. When working on Web standards, we only consider requirements that can be verified with a test to be meaningful — everything else is filler. Being as strict in our ethical standards is challenging, but we can strive for it. We can do that both at a high level, when looking at the broad outline and impact of a piece of technology, as well as in precise detail — both matter.

At a high level, the question to always ask is "in what ways does this technology increase people's agency?" This can take place in different ways, for instance by increasing people's health, supporting their ability for critical reflection, developing meaningful work and play, or improving their participation in choices that govern their environment. The goal is to help each person be the author of their life, which is to say to have authority over their choices.

Technologists trying to maximize user agency often fall into the trap of measuring agency by looking only at time saved. On the surface, the idea seems straightforward: spend less time on one thing, have more time for other things! That would seem to fit our mandate of improving "What each person is able to do and to be". And all other things being equal that can be true, but the devil is in the details: the enjoyment of doing the thing, the value in knowing how to do it, or the authority over outcomes. Even things that many would consider chores aren't always best automated or delegated away: you may not wish to clean your house but you might want a say in the chemicals introduced into your home, about how your things are organized, or over whether your house can be mapped by a robot and data derived from that map sold to the highest bidder. Not all leisure is liberation.

The more detail we have on a piece of technology that may be part of the Web, the more readily we can assess it in very specific ways that capture aspects of improved user agency. In fact, that's something that the Web community has been doing for a long time. Consider:

• The great level of detail that has gone (and continues to go) into specifying how to make the Web and Web content accessible. These guidelines and techniques can, in exceedingly concrete ways, push for a world in which disability does not limit agency.
• An equally-impressive trove of actionable principles can be found in the Internationalization work. This empowers people to use the Web in the languages of their choice. We will never celebrate the work of the Unicode Consortium enough. Bringing all of the world's languages into a unified system of character encoding is a historical achievement that "respects and empowers users".
• It's hard to act freely if you can't act safely, which makes work on security core to the agency project. RFC8890 ("The Internet is for End Users") captures this well when it states that "User agents act as intermediaries between a service and the end user; rather than downloading an executable program from a service that has arbitrary access into the users' system, the user agent only allows limited access to display content and run code in a sandboxed environment. End users are diverse and the ability of a few user agents to represent individual interests properly is imperfect, but this arrangement is an improvement over the alternative — the need to trust a website completely with all information on your system to browse it." This trust is empowering.
• And the same can be said about privacy, which is key to trust as well. Privacy further matters (as discussed in the Privacy Principles) in that it includes the right to decide what identity you present to others in which contexts. Additionally, widespread data collection creates information asymmetries and information asymmetries create power asymmetries. The issue here isn't so much that data might be used to support mind-controlling AI snake oil but rather that it powers more mundane (and far more effective) manipulation techniques such as hypernudging.

These practices (which the W3C refers to as "horizontal review" but that have broader applicability in the Web community) are all specific, concrete implementations of the Web's goal of developing user agency. We don't habitually think of them as ethical goals, but they are: they aren't random things that someone did for fun — they serve a purpose. And they work because they implement ethics that get dirty with the tangible details.

User agency isn't limited to these four things, important as they may be. A great way to build the future of the Web is to work through a gap analysis of the ways in which we could be developing user agency. This could include anything from building better ways to find things your way in search and recommendations, to organize with others and govern our online environment without having to beg a few large companies to listen, or to break out of the straightjacket of apps and tabs.

Additionally, developing ways to ensure that agency is not only possible but to the extent possible mandated by the system also furthers the Web. For that, we need to think beyond the individual.

Agency is Collective

Perhaps counterintuitively, focusing on user agency is not an individualistic position. As Amartya Sen put it, "Individual freedom is quintessentially a social product, and there is a two-way relation between 1) social arrangements to expand individual freedoms and 2) the use of individual freedoms not only to improve the respective lives but also to make the social arrangements more appropriate and effective." The motivation here is clear: increasing agency has to include the ability to influence collective systems as well as effective avenues for collection action. Under this view, the Web is (as per Aurora Apolito) “a form of ‘collectivity’ that everywhere locally maximizes individual agency, while making collective emergent structures possible and interesting.”

In practical terms, this has consequences for the evolution Web architecture. Much of the Web that exists today rests on the assumption that users exist on someone's server, essentially as guests on someone else's property. This has bred a default interaction model in which people have no rights other than those generously granted them by the local authority. Ultimately, the best governance model that is available in a client/server architecture is benevolent dictatorship. No matter how you set things up, the server can ultimately change the rules on a whim. In order to protect user agency and to imagine the Web as “a global community thoroughly structured by non-domination” we need to shape Web technology so that it shifts power to people rather than away from them. Doing so requires the return of protocols to the fore so as to push power to the edges and some changes focused on individuals like a drive to replace external authority with self-certifying systems, but also the deployment at scale of cooperative computing, communities under their own rule and their federations, and building subsidiarity into the Web so that more central authorities perform only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.

I will return to these points in greater detail in future posts, but for the time being suffice it to say: the next evolution of the Web has to further user agency by replacing today's system in which might makes right. This means that the next web is about governance and institutions.

Onwards

No group has ever managed to align on a definition of the Web, and the odds are that that debate will continue. But envisioning the Web as the set of digital networked technologies that work to increase user agency gives is both cohesion and a sense of mission that many of us have felt but that hadn't been put into words. This framing has further benefits:

• It is anchored in a powerful foundation of social ethics designed to impact the real world and to be measurable, the capabilities approach.
• It connects clearly with well-established, pragmatic, details, and concrete practices that make this ethical approach not just lofty but in many cases real. The Web communities has been developing and documenting those extensively through its work on accessibility, internationalization, security, privacy, and more to come.
• It directly supports the development of collective cooperative solutions through which people can act to improve their world and their communities without having to beg support from a handful of corporations.

Because of what I set out to do with it, this post was necessarily high level and somewhat abstract. My goal is to use this as a foundation atop of which many of us can build better systems together.

Philosophers across the millenia may have focused on figuring out whether the ship of Theseus would remain the same ship if you changed every single one of its planks over time, but they may have missed the reverse problem: if you don't replace each and every plank as it decays, then eventually the whole thing will rot and you definitely won't have the same ship any more, or any ship at all for that matter.

The Web, too, needs its parts replaced now and then. And frankly, some of our load-bearing planks are quite distinctly stinking of rot and our ship is taking on water. Knowing what the Web is and where it's headed helps us identify which parts need servicing and what to replace them with. It's time to scrape off some barnacles and get to work.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the folllowing excellent people (in alphabetical order) for their invaluable feedback: Amy Guy, Benjamin Goering, Boris Mann, Brian Kardell, Dietrich Ayala, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Juan Caballero, Kjetil Kjernsmo, and Marcin Rataj. Needless to say, anything dumb and stupid in this article is entirely mine.