2024 May 21
A recent essay and talk by Aaron Straup Cope touches on a lot of different interesting ideas, but one that particularly struck me was his experiment with puttings things — in his case, a musuem collection — on the Fediverse.
Cope currently works at the SFO Museum, as in, the museum embedded in the San Francisco International Airport, and seems to have a history straddling the cultural heritage and technology sectors. This sounds both super cool and, probably, often very frustrating — my impression is that museums and similar institutions have technology challenges similar to, but even bigger than, those found in scientific education and public outreach. In fields like these, if you have a visionary bent, you can imagine amazing new things that are possible with current technologies; and then trying to implement the most modest project is slow, grinding, often disillusioning work. Even when people buy into a particular vision, the resources needed to execute it well are often far beyond what can be marshaled — a situation I know well from projects like WorldWide Telescope (WWT) and the efforts to use it in education like Cosmic Data Stories. And there are, frankly, often people in positions of power who don’t seem to have a great deal of vision beyond the status quo.
Cope’s essay is a very nice textualization of a talk recently delivered at USF. It’s on the longer side, but well worth the read. (Side note: if you’re going to go to the effort of carefully preparing a talk, it seems well worth it to go the extra mile to write it up in this form — you’ll already have done the hard work of planning the argument and preparing visuals, and the result can propagate so much farther. Even if the talk is recorded, I find “too video; didn’t watch” to be a very real thing.)
Not being a museum person, I don’t have anything substantial to say about several of his points, except that they ring true to me. My colleague David Weigel of the INTUITIVE Planetarium at the US Space & Rocket Center, like Cope, spends a lot of effort on trying out ways that his experience can “follow you out of the building” — something that WWT is great for! — but I’m continually shocked-but-not-surprised at how few institutions seem to be tackling this challenge. I suspect that many individuals working at these institutions would love to do more, but just don’t have the resources they need to get anything off the ground. Sadly, this lack of resources seems to often turn into a sort of learned helplessness, rather than spurring creativity.
Cope is really into the idea of museum visitors building up a durable, personal relationship with the items in collections. Over the years, he’s been involved in a few attempts to use technology to encourage this — I gather that the Cooper Hewitt Pen is the best-known of these, although it’s not something that I’d heard of before. His most recent iteration is an idea that I love: creating a Fediverse/Mastodon account for every item in the SFO museum.
One of the motivations is as follows: right now, if someone in a museum sees something that they want to remember, the most likely thing they'll do is take a picture of it on their phone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I can imagine that as a museum curator it might feel like a hugely missed opportunity. It’s a one-time interaction, and structured information about the object in question is basically lost — in the sense that, say, if the object has a unique identifying number, there’s no reliable way for software to obtain it. Without that, even the most basic next steps that you can think of — e.g., “list all of the things that I liked at that museum” — aren’t possible.
So: what if instead, visitors could “like and subscribe” to objects?
Even if the object in question never posts anything, the “follow” action records the connection in a way that’s durable, bidirectional, and machine-actionable in the future. And you can immediately start thinking about things you can build based on the resulting social graph. (Which, of course, implies that privacy has to be considered carefully when building a system in practice.)
Cope correctly points out that there are some significant practical hurdles to getting this foundational interaction to work. A small one is that there’s no easy way to convert a QR code scan into a follow, as far as I know; the much, much bigger one is that so few people are on the Fediverse. But I am extremely sympathetic to the argument that this kind of interaction should be on the Fediverse, and not a proprietary network, and there’s something about this vision that seems to me to be so sensible, in a certain way, that it actually makes me more optimistic about the Fediverse taking off in general. While I don’t see an ecosystem like the Fediverse ever having the social, viral grip of a commercial product like TikTok, I could see it gaining traction for what you might call “anti-viral” communication patterns: municipal updates about garbage collection, that kind of thing. And there’s at least the possibility that commercial experiences will bridge to the Fediverse, à la Threads, although such bridging has become a whole, contentious can of worms.
To help motivate the focus on the Fediverse, Cope mentions that he asked someone at FourSquare if he could create 50,000 venues in bulk — one for each item in MoMA — and was, unsurprisingly, turned down. Likewise for creating 200,000 Twitter accounts. Beyond a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, which is a strong motivation in its own right, the ability to mass-create accounts is something that seems well-suited for a decentralized network. We see this with email, too. More generally, you often arrive at interesting places if you start with a service that has “user accounts” that were intended to be operated by a single human, and ask yourself: why might one person want to have 100 accounts? Why might one account might want to be associated with 100 people? Or zero? You see the same patterns pop up with things like the Apply Private Relay email service or virtual credit card numbers.
Beyond the connection-building functionality — social following is the new bookmarking, you heard it here first — you then have the fact that your objects can toot. (Which, if you’re not familiar, is what we’re supposed to call the equivalent of tweeting on Mastodon. I guess “tweet” sounded pretty silly at first, too.) Depending on your default level of optimism, this is probably either very exciting or very scary. Surely you can spark joy and build amazing connections with the right kinds of interactions. On the other hand — we have enough trouble answering support questions in person, and now you want us to monitor 50,000 inboxes? Content moderation? It’s hard for me to see how opening up all of these touch points doesn’t become a huge new source of work. You can definitely make the argument that it’s good work: if you’re a museum, what better way can you be spending your time than interacting with patrons in a sustained way? But it’s work all the same.
I’m not at all sure whether this particular idea will take off, but I love the audacity, and I like the range of new ideas that can build on it. What if every single Harvard plate had a Fediverse account? Why would people decide to “follow” a given plate? What would they say to it? What could we have the plates “say” spontaneously? If people start having conversations with plates, does that collected history start becoming a sort of per-item knowledgebase? I’m particular intrigued by this last possibility. If you can somehow get people into a habit of messaging objects — @-ing is the new annotation? — it seems like a whole new mechanism for achieving the goals of projects like The Underlay.
What might ensue if I created a Fediverse account for every post on this blog? What if every Wikipedia page was on the Fediverse, and posted about its updates? Every star in SIMBAD? Every drain in Somerville? Maybe — probably — a lot of these ideas just wouldn’t work, but it would be fun to find out.