Social Media: We Can Change the Defaults

The most visible technologists tend to be those who shill for tech and who can be counted on to be into the latest hype. They are founders or CEOs of major tech companies or at least work in their employ. They are also the reason many people don’t have a lot of trust in technologists and their ability to think about the world in anything but the most narrowly technocratic—and ultimately self-serving—terms. 

Other technologists, however, manage to stake out a position that takes a broader set of concerns into account. They are able to formulate a critique of the default modus operandi from within technical practice, writing code and building systems that call dominant norms and practices into question. 

This event features one such technologist, Christine Lemmer-Webber. Best known as co-author of ActivityPub, the protocol underlying most federated social media, Christine will speak about the crisis moment technologists face and the work the Spritely Institute, which she co-founded, is doing to make a positive future possible. Getting to such a positive future involves a move away from the assumptions underlying the web 2.0 era, and it also challenges orthodoxies of the Free and Open Source Software movement and the wider hacker culture. This move is not just a matter of developing different technologies, but entails a joyful and collective learning process. 

About the speakers 

Christine Lemmer-Webber is best known as a co-author of ActivityPub, the protocol that underlies federated social media applications such as Mastodon. As Executive Director at the Spritely Institute, a nonprofit research and development organization, she is working on making secure, distributed programming easier so developers can build decentralized networked systems that enable consent-based rich interactions.  

John D. Boy is a sociologist studying the interface between digital technologies and social life. After spending several years researching a mainstream social media platform and its significance in everyday life, he became interested in critical technologists and their efforts to transform everyday technologies such as social media. He has a tenured position at Leiden University, and in 2024–25 he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.