R&D Lab Progress Report: Browser Histories19 min read
The C/Change R&D Lab incubates projects applying emerging technologies to fostering safe and inclusive digital cultural exchange. In this Progress Report series we’ll be sharing updates and insights from each project team as they work towards building interactive prototypes.
This is the first of a series of blogs that will serve as process documentation as we build our first collaborative/interactive platform, Browser Histories.
I hope this blog will serve a number of goals, including:
- Transparency around the project: processing/building out loud, transparency around stakeholders, how we are making decisions, etc.
- Project documentation: keeping tabs on our timeline, documentation as archiving what we create as we create it, sharing our praxis as knowledge/inspiration for those doing related projects, adhering to open source ethics (and because we literally have to in order to fulfill the requirements of our grant)
- Sharing our work: connecting to those who are doing similar projects, opening to opportunity or cross-pollination/collaboration, gathering community, finding feedback & support
Introduction to Browser Histories
For context, this past June Decoding Stigma was selected for the C/Change R&D Lab at Gray Area in SF to incubate our project, Browser Histories. It’s an awesome opportunity that will get us to deliver our first workable rapid prototype this December, supported by grant funding from Goethe-Institut San Francisco.
When we initially pitched Browser Histories for incubation, we conceptualized around the idea of creating participatory archive of sex worker contributions to technology, presented as an interactive digital collection (a longer description of the project lives here). Browser Histories iterates from an eponymous event we facilitated in May 2021. This first Browser Histories event was designed to serve as a decompressive gathering for attendees of Hacking/Hustling’s Trains, Text, and Tits panel series, a 4-part class presented in May of 2021 documenting the history of sex work and technology from the 1800s to today. Attendees shared images, messages, playlists, links, writing, and other personal “keepsakes” that reflected personal experiences in which technology played a role in feelings of safety, creativity, and community in their individual experiences as sex workers. By design, no documentation of this event exists; our intention was to cultivate a community space that was defined by its ephemeral nature in order to replicate the interstitial space in which the sex worker feels most at home.
Since that first event, we have dreamed of creating a more permanent platform that can recover and preserve evidence of sex worker-led innovation in digital technology. This is in response to the systematic erasure of sex work from the history of technology, continuing a long history of devaluing the feminized labor and communal innovation that is actually the foundation upon which social technology is built. This erasure enforces the false narrative that scarcity-driven extractive Capitalism is the only way forward for tech. By compiling our own intimately-produced evidence, we move to rebel against this attempt to delete history, while honoring the necessity of desire—as fantasy, as survival, as collectivity—in driving the ways we communicate forward. Our goal for this iteration is to deliver a platform that will serve as a foundational repository for an open source archive that will invite sex workers to contribute their own artifacts toward a digital exhibition to be shared both online and IRL.
Phase 1: Project Development
It’s been just six weeks since the C/Change R&D Lab kicked off, and our first phase of project development has been nothing if not intensive. Our lessons have come in many forms: consultation, collaboration, research, ideation, defining project scopes, the growing pains that come with formalizing roles and creating organizational structure for the first time. We have already faced the challenge of pivoting in the direction of our project/final deliverable, and have entered totally new territory in our tech knowledge by doing so.
Process as Prototype
The Decoding Stigma community has consistently found ways to reallocate institutional resources (in terms of both money and/or merit) in order to make sure that sex workers are invited, cited, and paid for establishing and supporting knowledge-creation. This has looked like paid participation for panels/educational events, collaborating on published research, and “no questions asked” stipends for event attendees. In this case, we are using a large portion of our grant to create a paid SW/accomplice cohort to be part of our research & design process, who will provide expertise to help us define project goals, audiences, and implementation strategies. Honestly, this is probably the most exciting part of the project. Decoding Stigma was founded on the premise that sex workers deserve space to DREAM and it has been a long-term goal to create a collaborative R&D space that is established around imagination and play. This is the first time we have had the opportunity to design and execute a compensated workshop series with this intention, and expect many lessons will be learned in the process.
It’s already been an especially interesting challenge: how do we guarantee multidimensionality in all ways—background, experience, interest, perspective—within the constraints of a tight deadline and a finite budget? We had initially conceived this cohort to serve as an experiment in co-design, but had to concede that this would be impossible given our constraints. By defining the scope of our deliverable, we were able to quickly assess who would be interested in collaborating toward our particular goal. We are incredibly fortunate to have connected with so many brilliant folks over the last two years, and decided it best to invite some of those who could contextualize participation within past collective conversations.
We have also established partnerships with two other community initiatives—OnlyBans and Body of Workers—that are working on projects with goals aligned to our own. OnlyBans creator Lena Chen has been especially involved, as outcomes from our workshops will be used to help seed ideas for the third iteration of the game as supported by Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award. Three of our cohort members are coming directly from previous focus group participation for OnlyBans V2, further expanding the multidimensionality of the whole group. In addition, Lena’s input as we cultivate the actual “curriculum” has been invaluable, given that we are able to expand from her background in art as social practice, as well as subsume lessons from her experience gathering community toward informing a sex worker-led interactive media project. Browser Histories also carries the legacy of Body of Workers (BoW), a virtual private gallery created by and for sex worker artists created as part of Eyebeam’s Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future initiative. With a bit of extra funding provided by one of the original BoW partners, we have taken on furthering the BoW mission within the scope of our project. We decided to hire one of the original BoW platform developers to help build our project, so that Browser Histories literally emerges from that legacy in both spirit and practice.
The fact that we find ourselves part of a coalescence of aligned community-led projects is a direct result of the growing demand for the recognition and inclusion of sex worker genius. While the interactive Browser Histories archive is our required deliverable for the C/Change Lab, the process of designing this community cohort will serve our larger goal of documenting what it looks like to have sex workers involved and compensated at every level of a digital media project. As such, we will serve up documentation of our cohort sessions in hopes of inspiring future projects spinning out from our network, while sharing lessons learned so that it can be done better by those who take them on, and encouraging more fiscal support of these endeavors as an investment toward imagining more equitable futures.
Consultation & Resulting Formalization
We recognize knowledge extraction to be one of the great “sins” of sex work research. Many projects within this realm are objectifying in nature, making sex workers silenced statistics or token marginal representatives for the furthering of meritocratic status that generally excludes the same sex workers that are so important to these institutionally-located researchers (read this fantastic twitter thread for a thorough overview of this practice). So our most pressing concern from the outset was making sure we did not replicate this harm, especially as we invite participation from sex worker communities. Though we have the security of knowing our project as coming out of the sex worker-led initiative that is Decoding Stigma, we wanted to make no assumptions that this would be enough to move forward ethically. We therefore committed a significant portion of our time pursuing consultation and feedback as we developed our process. We reached out to those who have experience organizing within the sex worker movement or supporting it as accomplices, experts in design justice, art-as-action facilitators, and those who have cultivated fellowship cohorts that support ground-up intersectional knowledge creation.
Some key takeaways include:
- Figure out how to make this project valuable for all parties who are asked to participate. This can look very different from person to person.
- Be transparent from the outset. This means transparency about institutional stakeholders, hierarchies, project scope (required deliverables, timeframe limitations), how artifacts produced for the prototype will be used, and how participation will be documented or shared. Be open about what you do/not know.
- Define roles and expectations.
- Define community agreements and accountability processes before you ask people to participate.
- Identify that this is not co-design. It’s ok to come to a collaboration with a preordained project with a limited scope that also has flexibility for participation.
- Get familiar with Gantt charts asap.
We have implemented a number of recommendations already, which has served a real crash course in organizational structuring. We are very lucky that our respective work styles have historically complemented each others’ so seamlessly, which has allowed us to have a fairly spontaneous, independent collaborative style as project partners. But formalizing has given us the opportunity to figure out exactly what our work could look like at scale, and has helped us think through creating a responsible framework around including stakeholders outside of our central partnership. Most importantly, it has deepened our collaboration by creating space for us to communicate our needs, expectations, desires, and difficulties. It hasn’t been easy (it’s been incredibly arduous actually) but it has forced us to “move at the speed of trust” in a way that makes it easy to imagine sustaining our mission beyond this particular lab experience.
We are eternally grateful for all who have come forth to help school us at this first stage. The above is just the tip of the iceberg in all we learned in this consultation period, and we hope that we prove to heed the advice given through what we ultimately produce at the end of all this.
Platform Design Research
We came into the lab with very loose parameters for our project, due to our intention of adhering to community co-design principles throughout its development. We loosely developed an “interactive editorial” platform concept, that would act as a repository for multimedia creative responses to prompts and provocations in the form of writing, audio, imagery, video, and other creative expressions generated during speculative design cohort sessions. This would then be opened up to include crowdsourced submissions from larger public-facing events and calls for participation. Ultimately, the project would serve as an interactive, searchable database of responses, highlighting the wide breadth of contributions (in both size and variety) we hope to receive.
In terms of design inspiration, we have been looking toward data humanist projects such as ‘Dear Data’ by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, ‘Fleshmap’ by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, and ‘Queering the Map’ by Lucas LaRochelle. All of these projects critique extractive uses of depersonalized Big Data by instead using data as a way of expressing deeply human stories. Sex workers have been subjected to some of the worst harms facilitated by digitally-enabled data extraction, including carceral surveillance of online presence. So our project must speak to that harm without replicating it in our own data collection & representation.
We are also committed to maintaining the privacy of our participants. While we must thoroughly document our process, any documentation containing personal/identifying information will not be shared without clear, written consent. Since our cohort sessions are designed to initially seed our database, we have determined that sharing artifacts will be strictly “opt-in” so that people will have the option of participating without any obligation to share whatever they create within the collaborative space. However, we also want our participants represented in our final documentation, perhaps in an interview or portrait format. So we are playing with ideas of image anonymization that will allow participants to share personal experiences without compromising their identities.
We are greatly inspired by—and equally indebted to—to the many sex work archiving projects that have come before us, as well as those currently being built/stewarded by other community organizations. These include the Sex Workers Archival Project, the Heaux History Project, Objects of Desire, and the [unfortunately now defunct] Sex Work Database among countless other sex worker-curated memory spaces. As we develop Browser Histories past this initial prototype, we hope that our platform will serve as a hub connecting this radical network in a way that encourages cross-pollination and cross-promotion.
The Pivot: explorations in Web3
Plot twist: For the past 3.5 weeks we have been reengineering the entire project to incorporate Web3. How did this happen?
We launched into this first development phase confident that Browser Histories would fall well within the grant requirement of using emerging technologies around data in order to facilitate cultural exchange. After all, the concept is saturated in principles of data feminism, as defined by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein. We were especially keen on highlighting the third principle to “elevate emotion and embodiment with respect to data.” We reject the status quo of disembodied presentations of data, both in minimalist design that assumes objectivity, as well as in complex artistic interpretations of data that end up translating very human subjects/circumstances into trendy visualizations. These practices are often used by a rescue industry that counts on such dehumanizing representations of data to influence public opinion and policy against sex work. Harms caused by the erasure of sex worker presence from the history of digital media is precisely what we hope to recompense through our project, so it is imperative that the multimedia artifacts collected for the archive make legible the multiplicity, complexity, and emotionality of those whose stories we are platforming.
However, we were told that our artifactual data would have to be interpreted in some way that showcased novel use of an emerging technology, and the searchable multimedia archive we had initially conceived was not enough. It was suggested that we make a data-driven visualization out of the responses collected for the archive, beyond the visual aspect of the artifacts themselves. We felt that this solution would be in conflict with our core value of not replicating harm experienced by our community by promoting disembodied presentations of data.
So after all of this initial project development work, we were forced to return back to the drawing board.
We went back to our earliest conversations with C/Change, during which it was suggested that we consider implementing a Web3 element to our project. This suggestion was intriguing, as many ideas being explored in Web3 hold a lot of potential for building sex worker-friendly online spaces, especially as Web2 platforms continue to surveil and erase them. This includes discussions about censorship resistance, responses to financial tech discrimination, verifiable-but-anonymized identity, blockchain-enabled organizational transparency, and decentralized archiving. We ultimately decided against exploring this path, as Web3 was beyond our expertise as technologists and we were already confidently invested (wrongly, as we would only later learn) in our very Web2 archive concept.
However, in facing this project roadblock we saw an opportunity to reconsider this decision. We started to wonder, what would it mean to build an archive using decentralized internet architectures? How can distributed ownership foster community around the goal of producing and stewarding a collective memory space? And why shouldn’t we use this opportunity to learn something totally new, given that we are dreaming about the future?
We decided we could not even begin to approach these questions without first consulting with all those stakeholders we had already gathered around our initial concept. It’s fair to say that Web3 can be a polarizing topic in the extended Decoding Stigma community, especially as a lot of hyped Web3 discussions reek of techno-solutionism that does nothing to address the real world harms caused by the criminalization of sex work. As phrased by comrade Ashley Lake, “There is no technical solution to a political problem.” What does it mean to use cryptocurrency if you cannot cash it out to pay your rent, because you have been unbanked for your participation in sex work? How does advertising erotic services on a decentralized platform help sex workers if they still end up incarcerated for providing such services? The dominant portrayal of the crypto community certainly does not help, with its hyper-financialization, cultish elitism, and questionable aesthetics.
With this healthy skepticism, we went back to our project partners and those who had already agreed to join our cohort to ask what they would think about taking this Web3 pivot. Consensus rules said “let’s do this.” We were pleasantly surprised to discover that some of our cohort members had already been researching possibilities of blockchain technologies, including how they can be used to guarantee fair compensation for artists (like the Fairchain initiative, for instance). Others expressed an eagerness to learn about Web3 alongside community peers.
So here we are, three weeks since we made the pivot. We have been deep in the throes of gathering intel as fast as humanly possible. We have yet to finalize exactly how blockchain will be incorporated in the project, and we are honestly intimidated by the challenge. We expect to be met with the same skepticism that we had taking the pivot, but the conversations we’ve had within the crypto community have been surprisingly supportive and have evidenced practical applications far beyond DeFi use cases that dominate media coverage of Web3 development.
We did deep dives into technical documents such as the Ethernet dev docs to get a fundamental understanding of Web3 development and applications. We also had to respond to ethical concerns about the environmental impacts of crypto, given the very real climate catastrophe we are currently facing. In order to address this final concern, we have committed to building on the Solana network, a “high-performance, low-impact blockchain” that uses less energy per transaction than three Google searches, all supported by renewable energy sources. The Solana Foundation has also invested in carbon offset initiatives, thus achieving carbon neutrality while simultaneously helping other companies reduce carbon emissions.
Since establishing this fundamental understanding, we have done a lot of research focusing especially on how Web3 is being used for collective platform governance and participatory media projects. Some folks have suggested that we consider establishing a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), but upon sharing this idea with crypto professionals, we decided that legal ambiguity around cryptocurrencies used to support DAOs are too high risk to explore with a community that holds quasi-legal status. Instead we are focusing on how utility NFTs are being used for the same purpose as DAOs, without the legal messiness of potentially (and accidentally) violating securities regulations. We are rapidly connecting with other projects who have successfully implemented such practical uses, and are testing some ideas by sharing them for feedback from some of these communities.
We are in the nascent stages of this new development, but feel confident that this direction will allow us to keep the integrity of our original concept while exploring completely new technological territory. This is perhaps the most interesting challenge: how can we explain what we are building when it has never been done before? The only way we know how: by documenting everything as we learn and build. So on that note, keep an eye out for a future post dedicated to our Web3 journey, including educational resources that help us figure it out along the way.
