Afternoon!

Hope you've found somewhere cool to read this. Temperature-wise, but also vibes...

This week's top story looks at the Wikimedia Foundation, and how one of the last bastions of the "web that was" is making people nervous.

Also, we look at the Labour government's plans to ban social media for under-16s (which is a plan that will definitely work and have no side effects), Meta leaning into being just the worst, and the Pope quotes a Wizard.

And for our blog spotlight this week, a reflection on whether EU tech is all that it's cracked up to be.

Let's dig in...

Top Story

🚫 Big Tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

A quick summary

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that is best known for hosting Wikipedia (itself the 7th most popular website in the world) has recently let a bunch of its staff go. It appears most of these people were union organisers. Among the fired is Brooke Vinner, Wikimedia's first full-time staff member, its first CTO, and (per the foundation's own admission), "one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of [Wikimedia]."

So what?

I say this without hyperbole: I believe that Wikipedia is one of humanity's greatest inventions. Sure, it definitely used to be a bit of a lucky dip of veracity, but 25 years on that's changed, and it's pretty much the last of the old web that hasn't succumbed to "enshittification".

The community nature of the platform, and the ability for anyone to edit any page is its greatest strength. Popular pages might have 1000s of subject matter experts on the watchlist, meaning any changes can be verified and, if needed, instantly clarified or corrected. At a technical level, nothing is ever deleted from Wikipedia, and old versions of pages can be reinstated if needs be. Crucially, Wikipedia has never relied on "truth", but rather on "verifiability". In other words, the ability to back any statement made on the site by "at least one reliable, published source". It might have seemed like a pointless distinction 10 or 15 years ago, but in this post-truth era we find ourselves in, it's an important one.

Wikipedia is not a website. It is the largest reference work humanity has ever produced. It is the corpus that trains the AI models you use every day. It is the first citation when a high schooler looks up an unfamiliar term, and what a journalist reads before calling a source.

(By the way, if you really want to get into the weeds, you can read what Wikipedia defines as a "reliable" source here. Factors include things like the context in which the source is being cited, the age of the source, and how wildly accepted that source is in other publications.)

Ok, but why should we care about the firings?

If it's true that the firings were because workers within the Foundation were trying to unionise, then we're seeing a shift in values towards your classic Big Tech company.

Apropos of nothing, remember when Google's genuine official company motto was "Don't be evil"?

I'm kidding, of course. That was in fact apropos of this very topic. Back in 2019 (four years after Google quietly dropped that motto), the "Thanksgiving Four" claimed that they were fired from Google for engaging in "worker organising efforts". It was perhaps the highest profile of such cases, but by no means the only one. Its rare in technology companies to have unions (as any Amazon employee will tell you, presumably in hushed whispers). The lack of unionisation means that Google et al have much freer rein to do things like lay off 12,000 people overnight.

Its not just Google, and that's the point. Poke around these stories even a little bit, and you'll start to see the work "playbook" pretty much everywhere. Follow that thread, and you get everything from a paper from the Economic Policy Institute, an investigative journalism piece from The Intercept, and now this top story article from digital activist Jake Orlowitz.

This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.

Compelling... but everything is getting more expensive. Are we sure these aren't just cost-cutting measures?

Perhaps. But for what it's worth, Wikimedia seems to be in pretty good shape financially, with somewhere just shy of $300m in reserves. This is in no small part because it has joined the ranks of organisations that have sold access to AI companies as a revenue stream (we covered this a little last week in LT3 #30).

Also in a similar boat is Reddit, and it makes sense as a tactic for both organisations. Between them, Wikipedia and Reddit form the most cited sources in AI responses. AI was going to scrap both sites anyway, so they may as well get paid for it.

In a lot of ways, Wikipedia and Reddit are very similar. Both are trusted sources of information populated - by and large - by volunteers who are passionate about their niche subject matters. But where Wikimedia's revenue has historically gone into the Foundation's coffers to shore up the organisation's longevity, Reddit's (as a privately owned company) goes into lining the pockets of its owners. These owners include Condé Nast's parent company Advance Publications, the world's largest video game publisher Tencent, and OpenAI head honcho Sam Altman. Yup, you read that correctly, Sam Altman is paying Sam Altman to make Sam Altman richer.

All of which is to say that, while finances are always important to consider for any organisation of any size, it seems very heavy-handed to oust so many prominent staff for the sake of some spare change.

So what does this mean for Wikimedia?

One thing we haven't touched on yet, is that traffic to Wikipedia has been declining year on year since AI hit the scene. The AI partnership agreements might be a financial lifeline, but there are those that feel put out that their volunteer hours maintaining subject areas is being fed into an LLM that will mean fewer and fewer people visit the site. It is pretty much exactly what we talked about last week with Google's new search.

The bridge between the worries of the volunteer editorial community at Wikipedia, and the management team that runs the organisation, are the team that just got fired...

For an organisation that has survived the death of Web 1.0 based on trust and community values (not to mention mostly public donations), the shift towards a more corporate, AI funded, asset stripped mode of operation is starting to make people nervous.

What else is happening in the world of tech?

🚸 Labour set to announce crackdown on social media for children within weeks

Regular readers will not be strangers to the dangers of a social media ban, including the idea that it creates a "cliff edge" experience for young people on their 16th birthday, where they have zero experience what to watch out for in the online world. Of course, that might be a moot point anyway, as there is growing evidence to suggest that an under-16s ban doesn't work anyway. Studies out of Australia show little impact on the amount of online harm young people are exposed to, mostly because over 60% of children are still accessing social media despite the ban.

Clearly, the Australian model isn't the only way of going about this. But if the goal is to ban children from spaces where they might experience harm (and, spoiler alert, that isn't the aim at all cough state surveillance cough), that puts the focus in the wrong place. You let platforms off the hook with just a cursory ID check, instead of forcing them to take ownership of how people behave on their platform.

It's the quickest, most Orwellian way of (not) fixing the problem. The other ways - the ways that might have a chance at helping kids - are harder, more expensive, and less Big Brother-y. Which is why you won't see Starmer or anyone else recommend them.

💸 Meta rolls out subscription tiers for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp

We mentioned "enshittification" in our top story. It's the idea that digital platforms and services will decay over time. This happens in stages, but an important hallmark of the process is that what starts out as a free service devoid of ads will over time fracture into a two (or more) tiered system. Beyond a certain point, new features to the platform are only available to paying customers, and the rest of the user base is spammed with ads.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that this story was, like Thanos and Agent Smith both, inevitable.

🧝 Pope Leo Schooled the Tech Bros on Tolkien

And just because it's funny, have a read of this story. The Pope in his first "encyclical", quotes The Lord of the Rings in a plea-stroke-warning against the harms of AI. Wired (the linked article) uncharitably seem to think Leo didn't really know just how pertinent his reference was. I disagree, and either way, you can be certain that the link will not be lost on the guys who named Palantir.

Blog spotlight

🇪🇺 beware of EU-washing

"I don't want an EU version of Palantir."

I spend a lot of time in this newsletter comparing US and EU technology, policies, and attitudes. Broadly speaking, I think most of what the EU does in the tech space moves us in the right direction.

But this short blog from Ava did give me pause for thought. She's right, we seem to operate almost reflexively in an anti-big-tech (read: anti-American-tech) way. They produce Product Y, and the first response is "let's make Product Y but with all the data here instead of there" - sometimes without really thinking about whether we should be having that data at all.

Good catch.

That's it for another week. Enjoy the weekend when it gets here, and I'll see you back here next Thursday for more tech news, opinions, and rambles.

Will