“Web 2.0” starts out like this on Wikipedia:

Web 2.0 (also known as participative web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability for end users.

It enabled collaboration on a scale the world has never seen, and we’re currently reaping the benefits, including (and especially) from Wikipedia itself. But slowly & inexorably, the collaboration became centralized, systematized, and extractive. Social media was a primary vehicle for it, lowering the bar to asking only for your attention so it could generate billions in ad revenue. Now “AI” (large language models) is the ultimate expression of that trend, because it grinds up that collaborative labor and feeds it back to you for a fee so you can avoid that messy collaboration entirely.

That last sentence holds the key to where we were fooled: Collaborative labor is what Web 2.0 ultimately brought us, not collaborative authority.

Except for Wikipedia.

I frequently read critiques and pokes at Wikipedia’s byzantine bureaucracy that allows it to practice collaborative authority at a scale we’ve never seen. The implication is that so many rules must somehow corrupt the output of the collaborative labor. What we really need is a strong central authority, right? This is the endgame of what Web 2.0 funded: Collaborative labor (yay productivity!) but centralized authority (yay efficiency!). We built an ever-growing layer cake of top-down authority and we keep being surprised to find that our labor created no authority for us.

“Byzantine bureaucracy” can be a legitimate gripe by a private citizen feeling confused, but it’s also a fascist framing for any tools that enable healthy collaborative authority. The last decade of “disruption” was about undercutting collaborative authority (e.g. your city council) to re-centralize it. From the jump, our technological tools have coded top-down authority into them. Who has “root”? Who is the “admin”? Who is the “owner”? They get ultimate say, because they are put on a pedestal as more wise & knowledgable, while the truly wise & knowledgable are discredited and ejected. We learn to feed the machine and ignore who is behind the curtain.

The strawman trotted out next is pure egalitarianism. “If Wikipedia were truly egalitarian, then MY voice would matter just as much as that faceless editor!” cry the fascists. “And if it’s not egalitarian, why not trust my simple authority instead of all these rules no one understands?”

It’s all the same game. If all that exists are the extremes, why not choose the simpler extreme?

But there is a middle path, and it’s not terribly complicated. You ask competent & invested people to have more say over things they are competent at doing than folks who are novices. Maybe you create credentials to demonstrate competence, like the Bar Exam. Maybe you vote on it, like City Council. But you build an ecosystem that rewards the investment of your time by granting you more authority without removing all accountability. These ideas are the foundation of Western Civilization. This is the tightrope each generation must walk and Wikipedia models how to walk it every day.

That is its real danger to fascists: Not facts, but authority.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the myriad civic organizations of the United States decayed and dissipated as software spread. Where is the software that grants collaborative authority? The generational practice of organizing, meeting, taking minutes, & voting is still near-entirely analog and often even in spite of our software (“I guess we can put this public meeting on Zoom if you can find the link in our email list you didn’t know about, but the audio will cut a bit every 5 minutes, sorry”). Wikipedia uses obtuse, non-obvious patterns in its software to enable collaborative authority that rests on convention far more than technology, yet by the standards we’ve set it’s absolutely cutting edge.

“Engagement” is a metric defined in ephemeral clicks & views, not time invested. Instead of asking “is this friction useful?” it demands we eliminate all friction so we can go faster and grow bigger: You must accept our new terms. Ticket closed. You’re banned. You’re unbanned. Done. Meanwhile, Wikipedia revels in ‘Talk’ pages that are frequently longer than the articles being discussed. Decisions can be slow, and the onboarding to contribute is a famously steep learning curve. But it’s successfully doing the work with collaborative authority in a way that is peerless.

Yet we sit and scratch our heads like it’s some kind of mystery how it’s succeeded.

When I was a senior in high school, we were assigned essays on a “controversial topic” of our choice. Peers chose things like abortion rights and legalizing weed. I chose forms of government, contrasting variants of democracy with fascism. It hadn’t occurred to me to choose a “hot button” topic du jour because my brain decided “controversial” meant things over which we are most deeply divided and examine least. By contrast, any “cultural warrior” topic felt trivial because it was well-trod and so clearly a proxy for control. So, I wrote about the source of that control. No one thought it was particularly interesting.

I felt like I’d misunderstood the assignment.

I don’t anymore.

If we don’t relearn how to wield collaborative authority soon, we won’t have much left to collaborate with.

This prose alone won’t get us there, so I’ll try writing it in code too.