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Four Words: The Web You Want

NB: Vasilis asked me to just put this text online, i'm still adding references..

The instigator for this essay is Vasilis van Gemert who had the brilliant idea to organise a conference called ‘The Web You Want’ at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Me being me - computer scientist/ philosopher/ lecturer - i immediately started tripping on the title: Why these exact choice of words? What does it all mean? This is due to an acquired philosophical tendency to complexify everything i encounter beyond comprehension, looking for clarity i might never reach. However, the journey is more important than the destination… right? I’d like you to tag along on this trip along four words in which i will ask the following questions and, within given time, search for possible answers.

Four questions

Is this conference really about ‘the’ web, or could it be about ‘a’ web?
What is the content and extent of the word ‘web’ and what meaning is attached to it in this context?
Is it really ‘me’ being addressed through ‘you’ or is there a hidden agenda in Vasilis’ choice of words and what happens if ‘you’ is changed to ‘they’?
Want expresses a desire… How can we understand this desire?

Let’s ponder on some of the possible answers in realisation that we will never find a definitive answer, it wouldn’t be philosophy otherwise. We will conclude on a lighter note leaving all of us with an insurmountable task, great!

Is this conference really about ‘the’ web, or could it be about ‘a’ web?

In the profound English language we are bound to use two kinds of articles, a definite ‘the’ or indefinite ‘a(n)’. The definite variant was chosen in the sentence we’re researching and of course i wonder what would happen if we’d use the indefinite article instead. Is there difference in usage? This might seem like insignificant nitpicking but there is a big philosophical difference between these seemingly similar terms. This difference touches on philosophical questions about (the possibility of) knowledge, identity, existence and the way we structure the world. I for one, indoctrinated by postmodern philosophers, prefer a pluriverse of possibility above the one-world-world. How about you? Let’s see what we can find…

‘The’ is the definite article, symbol of the specific. Something unique and already known, or that can be identified. It implies (or supposes) a shared understanding between the speaker/ writer and the listener on what is meant. eg. ’THE apple’ in the sentence, ‘please hand me the apple’, points towards a specific apple that both parties know. So ‘the’ presumes a shared context of knowledge implicating that the speaker/writer and listener are in the same “world” in which the named object already exists. Programmatically speaking, “the” variable - probably a constant - is named/ declared/ baptized and already bound to a specific value. This can be taken as a form of intersubjectivity, a shared understanding between people. ‘The’ signifies something that is not just ‘a’ thing but ‘that’ specific thing. There is a certain direction in attention on both sides of the utterance. An acknowledgement of the existence and unique nature of an object with a specific place in reality. Reflecting a deterministic outlook on the one-world-world, adhering a solidified theory of everything.

‘A(n)’ is something completely different as it signifies something general and indefinite. A thing that might be part of this or that category but isn’t exactly unique. It implies that the specific object is not yet identified. eg. ‘AN apple’ in the sentence ‘please hand me an apple’ means any other apple without pointing to a specific one. This philosophically reflects a tension between the particular and the general. ‘The’ points towards the concrete and unique, while ‘a’ points to the abstract and general. It introduces something new, something that was unknown within the context. It opens the door to possibility and potential without connecting a specific meaning. There is an unbound variable waiting to be connected to a specific value. ‘A’ points towards possible futures, it represents an open and insecure world, where things aren’t completely determined, ‘a’ pluriverse in which we get to fill in the yet unbound future..

We can interpret this as a reflection of epistemology, the study of knowledge: ‘the’ is about what we know while ‘a’ is yet to be discovered or interpreted. It’s the difference between what is actual and what is potential. Seeing this explanation i’d rather work on discoverable future possibilities of ‘a web’ than being stuck in the known cybernetic crevices of our commercially exploited and weaponized ‘the web’. Language being the utterly weird thing it is we could, with Hans Reichenbach, make a time shift and agree to use the word ‘the’ to describe a potential future work of perfection. But in my mind, this would be totalitarian, i want discoverability, the openness of a future pluriverse in which things we cannot even imagine are possible. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and jump to conclusions after the first small exercise but instead continue with the second word, ‘web’.

What is the content and extent of the word ‘web’ and what meaning is attached to it in this context?

Excavating the meaning of a word is a very Foucaultian thing to do but before getting out “power”-tools and drilling down we need a small background story about philosophy of language.

There is this Austrian high-class guy called Wittgenstein who wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, arguing how language only makes sense if there is a testable connection to observable things. This so called ‘correspondence theory of language’ roots out religion and metaphysics as philosophizable concepts because by nature there can’t ever be concrete answers. A lot of philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon world embraced this idea naming their philosophy ‘analytic’ as opposed to more European focused ‘continental’ philosophy. However, nudged by Gödels incompleteness theorem, Wittgenstein slowly realised that he himself was actually pretty continental, so he changed his mind and wrote Philosophische Untersuchungen, in which he states that he used to be utterly wrong. Language gets its meaning in use and words have value in the way they are used. In fact everything we do is explainable as an engagement in language games, like the one we are in right now. Let that sink in…

Back to Foucault.. With similarities to Wittgenstein he researches truth-games and shows how power, knowledge, and discourse mutually shape one another, thereby determining what is considered as true, normal, and possible in a given society. For him a “word” is never just a neutral label but a node where history, power, and knowledge converge. “Words” nudge their users towards certain kinds of behaviour through a process called normalization. In other words, and channeling McLuhan, we shape our ~~tools~~ languages and in turn, our ~~tools~~ languages shape us.

Let’s follow in Foucault’s wake and explore the everyday use of the word “web” to see if we can excavate hidden power structures. Occupational bias forces me towards the WWW but of course there are a lot of everyday physical conceptions of the word ‘web’, like a spider web, other woven material and figurative uses like web of lies. Let’s see what secrets lie in the heart of these everyday uses stating deliberately that what follows is in no way individually necessary and jointly sufficient to capture all possible uses of the word ‘web’.

Spider webs are intriguing artefacts of insect engineering. Networks of silk threads spun with purpose: mainly trapping prey, but in some species providing shelter for eggs or flying around and i’m not even talking about Spiderman. Spider silk is lightweight, flexible and incredibly strong. Different types of silk are used for different parts of the web, such as sticky silk for catching prey and non-sticky silk for structural support. Spider webs come in many shapes because spiders adapt their web to the environment and their needs. Some are funnel shaped, some are planes that are smaller and sturdier in windy areas, larger and more spread out in dense vegetation. Let’s see what insights we can gain using the spider web as analogy for the WWW.

A web is a network, not a hierarchy or a list but a distributed mesh of interconnected nodes. Just like silk threads connect anchor points across a physical space, hyperlinks connect resources across the digital. Unlike some spiderwebs the WWW has no single centre; the topology emerges from countless individual acts of “spinning”. The WWW is the product of billions of independent contributors with no single coordination, arguably its most interesting characteristic.

Spider silk is disproportionately resilient for its weight, it doesn’t collapse when one or two threads are broken. There are however structural threads that when broken, trigger a fold of part of the web. The WWW achieves similar robustness through redundancy and distribution, the original ARPANET was built from the principle that a network should survive node failure by rerouting. In similarity with the spider web there are some extra special nodes (eg AMS-X) that might cut off parts of the WWW. There is another form of adaptiveness in the WWW, the subtle art of responsiveness through which we build stuff that will display nicely even though we don’t know what device it will run on.

‘Webs’ are purpose built with intent, the main purpose of a spiders web is trapping prey, I wouldn’t go as far and say that the main purpose of the WWW is exactly the same but its architecture does encode intent: pages, APIs, apps and services are designed, built and published to serve particular goals. You can certainly see how these days humanity uses a disproportional amount of websites purposefully designed to catch us in their funnels, influence our behaviour, mine our attention or steer us towards a transaction. It seems like no psychological dark pattern is left unused to capture and guide visitors towards certain behaviour.

Aside from spiders physical manifestation on earth the word ‘web’ holds other everyday uses with woven material on different levels of abstraction. A web can be an artifact like a weave or mesh.

In the textile industry the word web is used in quite a few different ways. The pre-yarn fiber sheet in which fibers are spread to hook into each other before being spun into threads is called ‘web’. After ‘spinning’ - ’spin’ is the dutch word for spider… - threads are put together in a proces called knitting or weaving to form fabric. It can be a tightly woven fabric such as canvas, jeans or denim which creates a surface or plane, but it can also be knitted into an open structure that makes it more mesh like, for example in netting, gauze, tulle or lace. In both cases you can see traces of the process of creating, the warp-and-weft decisions made during the process that characterize the finished product. Warp are the fixed longitudinal threads held under tension while weft are the mobile threads that pass through or transverse the warp.

Just like in the study of fabric we can dive in to the structure of the WWW and look at in what way specific area’s of the web are connected. We can think of a conglomerate of sites that link to all other sites within the conglomerate creating a tight structure, or a loose ring where sites link to exactly one other site looping the last in line to the first site, or a trap on one specific platform using javascript to prevent navigating away. What other forms/ shapes (morphe) can you come up with! I’d very much like to hear creative ways of describing a flock/ gathering/ murder of sites!

Aside from representing structure fabric is also used as surface. Think of T-shirts with a clear political message or ancient royal tapestries depicting heroic deeds. In tapestries as in some high quality woven shirts, the image on the front of the fabric is inseparable from the structural logic on the back as the story is woven into the very fabric. In lower quality fabric stories degrade over time, through washing the image fades and is forgotten, traverses into myth, as is the case with every band shirt i’ve ever owned.

The analogy is clear, the WWW entails both a structure and a surface to carry meaning. On most commercial sites, meaning is highly transitory, sites that consist of some kind of feed that follows fads and fashions and flows like a current. Like band shirts, we seem to have a weird kind of fascination with these volatile surfaces as they are deliberately designed to speak to our psyche. Just look around you in public transport to witness humanity’s fascination with the ‘fleeting web’. Luckily there are sites on which meaning is more solidified, or static. Well designed sites, artefacts where structure and surface tie into each other, just like in historical tapestries. These are places you remember, sites you revisit because the meaning carried over resonates deeply within you.

A third use of woven fabric lies in the word ‘webbing’ which describes a mesh structure of tightly interwoven straps that binds/holds meaningful stuff together, for instance in cars or planes. Webbing takes care of the stuff we cherish, making sure it survives our rough journeys. We can look at hyperlinks and depict them as the ‘webbing’ of the web, taking care to use it as a noun and not a verb. That would be preposterously neo-platonic, talking about the ‘webbing of the web’, holding the view that in the intelligible world there must exist a perfect version of the web to which the web available in our sensory world will always be an imperfect shadow. Or might this hypothetical metaphysical perfection be the web in Vasilis’ intent?

Then there are figurative uses of the word ‘web’. Echoing the spiders cunning manifestation we can also find ourselves caught in a web of lies or intrigues, but let’s not linger for too long.

Is it really ‘me’ being addressed through ‘you’ or is there a hidden agenda in Vasilis’ choice of words and what happens if ‘you’ is changed to ‘they’?

These are actually three questions wrapped into one. Let’s take look at the third part, what happens if the pronoun ‘you’ is changed to ‘they’? Using ‘they’ is unbound in the same way that ‘a’ is unbound. We can use the word and hook it up to any selection of things:

‘They’ the tech-feudalists, extorting humanity, mining attention, squeezing every last penny out of us
‘They’ the web-builders, creating fancy sites that can only be used on fancy computers
‘They’ the users, with all their differences, peculiarities and preferences, the web that accommodates everyone. I think this is what TBL meant when he stated: This is for everyone, but somehow mainstream webdevelopers are failing miserably.
‘They’ algorithms, i remember a time when we just built website, later we built websites with SEO in mind and if i follow some of the speakers at SmashingConf we have to lint the fruits of our labour to accommodate to AI algorithms to achieve perfect design to code bridges
‘They’ the trees, reporting growth through sensor networks
‘They’ the squirrels, having their privacy violated by webcams while going nuts
‘They’ the population of Dodo’s before the arrival of settlers

We see that difficulty arises from using ‘they’ because ‘they’ can entail every selection of entities we can come up with. Although i like possibility and inclusivity this approach leads us into infinite complexity. We already encounter a lot of problems building ‘a’ web for every’one’, how would we even set out to design a web for every’thing’?

Let’s leave this thought here and look at the part first question. It is about all the things signified by ‘you’. If ‘i’ read this title, ‘you’ addresses ‘me’. ‘You’ might also address any other person in this audience. Who is it? Vasilis, please enlighten us? But ‘you’ might also address a group of people, maybe even the whole audience and can even be used as a directive.

‘You’ might signify ‘me’ and this aligns perfectly with Vasilis’ exclusive design approach. ‘The web’, my web, real connections with real people devoting very real time to real content. Everything i open actually interesting to read, for me! Enter the ultimate ‘Justus’ bubble, no more generated slop, no commercial traps mining my attention, just quality ASCII-arted content perfectly aligned with my personal interest grid and never… any… banner… Maybe there’s something in it for you, maybe not, i don’t care, my web. This sounds wonderfully scary and very solopsistic but we are actually algorithmically forced into bubbles on a daily basis and judging by numbers we seem to enjoy it. I don’t know about you, but i would very much like to meet Others and have my assumptions destroyed, preferably replaced with new insights based on better arguments. Please be gentle, not all my assumptions at once…

‘You’, might also mean you, any other person in the audience, imagine the web YOU want. The question arises if there will be anything appealing to ‘my’ specific taste inside ‘your’ bubble. But this would also form a philosophical problem called the ‘problem of other minds’. If the web is made especially for you, and others are a part of creating it, then there must be something it is like to be you? Nagel might want a few words with you if you actually think there is.. and even if there is, can ‘Others’ actually experience what it is like? This ‘Otherness’, what Levinas calls ‘alterity’, lies in the fact that Other people are infinitely beyond comprehension. We simply can’t grasp the infinitely transcending Otherness they represent. That is what makes the web fun, being amazed by all these wonderful people with weird fascinations.

‘You’ can also address a group of people and might even address a part or even all of you, this audience as a whole. This conference is called ‘the web you want’ and here you are. The thing being talked about here is probably something you actually want or you wouldn’t be here! The ‘you’ in the title combined with the ‘want’, might have spoken to your fear of missing out (FOMO). Could this be a perfect marketing strategy conjured to fill these seats? Picture Vasilis caressing his copy of Cialdini, gloating over all you people that actually turned up. Maybe he even meant to use ‘you’ in a directive way, demanding that what is presented here today should be the actual web we want… Well, let me tell you, I’ve worked with Vasilis for some time now, long enough to conclude that this could never be his intention.

The last option is that ‘you’ is used to address us as a group of people, but in a special way that targets each one of us individually. If taken this way, ‘the web’ in question would have to accommodate everyone and could never be a singular thing. This view resonates with the pluriverse and might hold enough explanation to settle on for now.

Want expresses a desire… How can we understand this desire?

As you can probably imagine, there is a lot of philosophy on the subject of desire as it entails an important human faculty. I’ll rush by a few french philosophers trying not to make things too abstract.

For Lacan, a psychoanalytic, desire comes from a fundamental “lack” or incompleteness. Desire is a not drive towards satisfaction but a perpetual movement around absence, rooted in the fact that as soon as we learn language we lose unmediated access to ourselves and to the world. Desire tries to fill that gap by fixating on a goal, the thing that promises satisfaction is called l’objet petit a which is not a real thing but a fantasy placeholder that keeps desire in motion. This is not a desire you have but a desire that has you, and satisfaction will always displaced or somehow off. That is why desire immediately relocates to the next thing. The Lacanian approach is not to satisfy your desires but to transcend them. Traversing the fantasy and recognize our l’objet petit a as structural placeholder and start relating to our lack instead of being tyrannized by it. Through this process our relation towards incompleteness changes towards désir assumé, assumed or accepted desire knowing that it will never be fulfilled but will be a life-work.

Sartre holds the view that desire is a key part of human freedom and subjectivity, the spark that sets us into motion, that makes us project ourselves into the future. However, Sartre warns of ‘bad faith’, where we pursue desires imposed by external sources rather than those that reflect our authentic self. With Sartre we can ask if ‘the web you want’ entails a desire that is truly your own or a wish/ dream or that it is shaped by societal expectations?

According to Girard there is no such thing as authentic desire because our desires are always shaped by the desires of others. We want what others want because we imitate their desires in a struggle for recognition. Desire is not a direct relation between subject -> object, but a triangular one, subject -> model -> object. Copied desires often lead to rivalry, conflict, and a “desire to desire” and managing them requires, in line with Lacan, awareness and an intentional shift of focus, not suppression. We can never fully eliminate our mimetic nature, but we can manage its destructive tendencies by moving from unconscious imitation to conscious awareness. We can do this by identifying the models underneath our desires and ask ‘who’ makes me want this instead of ‘what’ do i want. Then you decide if the model is an internal rival telling you that you are not good enough, or a distant idol that you consciously hold in awe. You can use these insights to stop fussing over rivalry and start actively following worthy role-models.

Now that we have a little background in desire we can look at the temporality of ‘the web you want’ or in other words, is there a ’when’ connected to the fulfilment of this desire. Frankfurt likes to nitpick about these things and distinguishes multiple orders of desire. The ‘want’ing of the web sounds like it might be a second or third order desire. In first order desires you ‘want’ something concrete that is easily satisfied: Either you decide to act on your craving and get that sweet-tooth it’s share, or you don’t and work on flattening curves instead. The overwhelming size of the web hints at the impossibility of being a first order desire. Second order desires are more abstract, one step removed from our actual experience and describe things like: i wish i wouldn’t crave for sweets or i wish the web would be another place. Second order desires are usually conflicting and therefore much more difficult to deal with. Third order desires are way out there and feel a bit like placing accountability outside yourself, desires like: i want to be a person who’d want do things. There is discussion on the possibility of third order desire as it is the first step in an infinite regression. We could for instance think up a fourth-order desire in which i would want to be a person would want to be a person who’d want something, or a fifth…, sixth… et cetera ad infinitum.

Infinite regressions are fun but crash computers as well as brains.. But our problem persists, how do we explain want in our search for clarity? Luckily, the Belgian philosopher Stefaan Cuypers (KU Leuven) conjured a surprisingly easy and fulfilling answer to the problem described by Frankfurt: Love! We are influenced by others and can’t always decide what desire or choose to follow, sometimes it just happens; we feel love for something or someone. This love precedes rationality and gives us reasons to do things we care for. Following Cuypers, the only thing that keeps you from realising the web you want is to really embrace the goal and actually reserve time to deliver things you are passionate about. This might sounds easy but is one of the hardest things to do in the maelstrom of things bombarded at us in the experience of life.

To conclude

Congratulations! You made it to the end of this session. Let’s recap the things we found close-reading the title of this conference:

The distinction between ‘the’ and ‘a’ encodes a fundamental philosophical divide between a deterministic, singular world of fixed knowledge and an open, pluralistic universe of possibility and discovery.
The word ’web’, whether spun by spiders, woven into fabric, or hyper-linked across the digital, reveals a tension between entrapment and openness, between surface and structure, encoding the intention of it’s creators.
The pronoun ‘you’, whether addressing a singular self, an unknowable Other, or an entire audience, ultimately resists reduction to any single referent, mirroring the pluriverse itself: a web that can never be one thing for everyone, yet must somehow be everything for anyone.
Beneath all the philosophical wizardry of lack, bad faith, and mimetic rivalry, the path to the web you want turns out to be disarmingly simple: love the web enough to care for it and decide how you give it your time.

the/a web you/they/i want/love

the web you want the web they want the web i want

the web you love the web they love the web i love

a web you want a web they want a web i want

a web you love a web they love a web i love