Tech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon

What happens when innovation doesn’t fit the usual narratives?

Tech and business journalists know what to do with Twitter.

Twitter is a for-profit company with headquarters in California. It has a CEO. It has investors and revenues and a valuation. The purpose of the company is to make money for its investors by growing the user base as large as possible and extracting as much cash as possible from that user base, either through advertising or subscriptions. Though the product it delivers is different, Twitter is pretty much the same thing as Snapchat and Facebook and Netflix, and Google.

Twitter fits easily into the standard tech journalism templates, which include:

•     “New, exciting tech company will revolutionize everything!”

•     “Older, established tech company releases new product!”

•     “Look how rich or weird this tech CEO is!”

•     “Tech company acquires another tech company!”

•     “Tech company is on the rise!”

•     “Tech company is in decline!”

•     And, when things go awry: “Tech founder faces criminal charges!”

Tech journalism isn’t special in this regard. Every genre of journalism has narrative grooves — ruts may be a better word — into which it easily slides.

A lot of what we see in tech journalism is either consumerist content or standard business journalism dressed up in a Steve Jobs turtleneck. The consumerist stuff shows up as weirdly breathless reviews of new products that are mostly the same as the old products or descriptions of updates to existing tech (“three exciting new features in iOS 16.2!”). The business-journalism stuff is all about stock prices and mergers and acquisitions. For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of.

Tech journalism serves these purposes pretty well. I have certainly read my share of reviews of tech products and I am far more familiar with the business activities of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos than I really need to be. But what happens when something big happens in the tech world that doesn’t fit the standard narratives?

Values over profit

I was prompted to write this post when I ran across the following post on Mastodon by Annalee Newitz:
 

Gotta love tech journalists who describe Mastodon as “that impossible-to-use website.” First of all, it’s an app. C’mon. Second of all, aren’t these the same people who write breathless explainers about the wonder of cryptocurrencies, which are not only impossible to understand but literally built from bullshit?

Like Newitz, I’m an increasingly enthusiastic adopter of Mastodon, and, like them, I’ve been kind of confused by the press coverage around the platform. The media seems to be regarding Mastodon as a bizarre curiosity, something that the general public couldn’t possibly grasp. Sure, the guys with a Linux server in their basement might geek out on it, but this thing isn’t for the masses.

Maybe.

But maybe the problem is that tech journalists don’t know what to do with something like Mastodon. You see, Mastodon doesn’t fit the standard tech narratives.

Mastodon is not a company. It’s an open-source platform that isn’t owned by anybody. It has a founder, a German guy named Eugen Rochko, who seems to be the opposite of the standard megalomaniacal tech founder. He started Mastodon as a personal project, and he maintains it along with hundreds of other volunteers via Github. Nobody controls Mastodon. It’s decentralized on purpose — a person or institution can set up their own Mastodon server, which can communicate with other servers just like you can email somebody on Outlook from your Gmail account.

Perhaps most importantly, no one is profiting off of Mastodon. Unlike almost everything in the tech industry, it wasn’t started as a way to make its founders piles of cash.

What’s attractive about Mastodon isn’t the software (it’s not as slick as corporate social media but it’s still very good) — it’s the values of the platform. No one is trying to hack the attention of Mastodon users for profit, no one is bombarding us with ads. It’s just a community of people, communicating.

Mastodon’s values are antithetical to the way we’ve come to understand the purpose of technology and technology companies. We’ve been trained to favor ease of use and affordability over everything else. If a product is slick or free, then we are expected to sacrifice whatever’s necessary — usually our privacy or our attention span — to use it.

Tech journalism usually operates on and amplifies these assumptions; they’re baked into most of the coverage of the technology world.

But what if people decided that the values of a platform were the most important thing about it? What if people liked the feeling of not being manipulated by algorithms? What if people thought that not feeling like garbage every time they log off of social media was more important than having a really slick app? What if one of our big social networks was crowdfunded and run mostly by volunteers?

Right now, using Mastodon feels way better than using Twitter did. People there are more engaged and less cynical. There’s more communication and less broadcasting for likes and follows. It feels healthier. This may change, of course — I worry that if Mastodon gets big enough, for-profit companies may stomp in somehow. But at the moment, it feels refreshingly different.

So far, tech journalists have approached Mastodon like it’s another startup. By trying to force Mastodon into their usual narratives, they’re missing that what’s really innovative about Mastodon isn’t its technology — it’s the platform’s values.

Source