We believe that human dignity and happiness requires autonomy, the more the better. Autonomy is the ability to solve the problems that affect you. It is in the first place, emotionally rewarding to overcome a problem, but also, in making an improvement, you have now increased your ability to overcome, so future rewards increase too. If you can directly solve a problem, you have autonomy. If you can negotiate, bargain, campaign, or suggest someone else into solving your problem. This also counts as autonomy. If you can only complain, and are ignored, or worse, the person who could fix it doesn’t even know about your problem, you don’t have autonomy. You are frustrated. This is the opposite of autonomy.
Modern technology has achieved incredible things, but it has, for the most part, decreased autonomy. Because modern technology depends on incredible scale of systematic processes and supply chains, when problems arise, they may originate a very long distance from you.
There are some thinkers who agree that Autonomy is important, and that modern technology decreases it, and conclude that the only solution is to abolish modern technology and return to hunter/gathering or some variation on that. But we do not agree with those thinkers.
Autonomy Enhancing Technology
We do not agree, because we recognize that there are some cases where modern technology increases autonomy. These cases are the exception rather than the rule but they offer a ray of hope. One of these is the way that the internet has dramatically increased the ability to spread skills and knowledge. Acquiring skills and knowledge always increases autonomy, and the ability we have to find out how to do something just by reading some articles or watching a youtube video are amazing. Another ray of hope is open source. Once you have computer programming skills (acquirable via the many open resources available on the internet) you not only get huge amounts of given-away code that you don’t have to write, but if you have a problem with it, you can probably improve it, and when you are really lucky you can make a difference just by suggesting an improvement. Amazingly, open source has become the dominate way that the best development software tools are created. Software developers know this is the best way to run things. It has already won. Not all the consumer (read: autonomy starving) market has caught on yet, but software developers already just do it. This is amazing because it’s the core of modern infrastructure, but also, open source is economic dark matter that can not be explained if you only measure value in dollars. Open source also has the very valuable quality of being a autonomy multiplier. Because all this free and open code exists, you now have more resources to learn from and solve problems. These two examples are not enough to save us from being herded around by the rest of modern technology, but provide enough foundations to argue that autonomy increasing technology is possible.
Therefore, we must research, experiment, explore, and design more autonomy increasing technology. This includes creating alternatives to, or rethinking existing autonomy-robbing technology.
Autonomy Robbing Technology
The web browser is one example of an autonomy robbing technology, although it increases autonomy in some ways. It has enabled the increased autonomy via distributed learning, and created a set of tools that a developer can create websites and web applications. However, in the 2000s certain web applications grew to such a degree that the web’s inherent autonomy robbing features became apparent. It is not just one web application. It’s many, known collectively as “web2.0”. In web 1, people made websites directly. In web 2, platforms provided slick tools to make it easy for “users” to “create content”. web 2 is driven by “user created content”. This is mildly autonomy growing because these users are able to share their thoughts and grow their audience. But they don’t really have control over the platform they use. The platform uses manipulative designs to distract viewers into spending more time on the platform, which is monetized by showing them ads. These manipulative designs are known as “dark patterns”
For example, instead of simply showing users the content they have explicitly asked for, the platform inserts “suggestions” into side panels, between articles, or even before they have scrolled down to the actual content! users may regain some of their autonomy using ad-blockers, but usually the dark patterns remain.
This is enabled by the browser by a feature called the “Same Origin Policy”. The Same Origin Policy means that a website can only make requests back to the server it came from. This means that the platform has total control over how their platform is presented. It is not possible for a third party to create a new interface, so users have to take it or leave it. This is also disappointing, not just because of dark patterns, but often even very successful platforms have clunky interfaces, so you cannot simply choose one that suits you better. Not to mention that this blocks 3rd parties from creating innovative new features that enhance aut
