Sense8 and ActivityPub: What if the connection was real?
Everybody at NovaFuture is a huge Sense8 fan. The show is beautifully made, sure, but mostly it lines up 100% with a lot of what we stand for. That’s not all we’re going to talk about here though. Far from it! I’m honestly not sure how things went off the rails this badly? Anyway, this article somehow manages to connect Sense8 and ActivityPub. Bold? Or total nonsense? No idea… So read to the end and tell me whether it’s a train wreck or not 😉
Sense8 is a show that literally transcends human relationships
It’s 2015. Netflix is only just starting to look like a real alternative to regular TV. That’s the moment the Wachowski sisters, who reshaped science fiction with The Matrix, show up with a project that has nothing to do with what the platform usually makes. Sense8 is their first series and it carries everything that made them strong in movies: visual ambition, philosophical depth, no compromise. It’s a flat-out success.
The setup is easy to sum up and impossible to really explain. Eight people, eight cities, spread across the planet. Nairobi, Mumbai, Chicago, Berlin, Seoul, Mexico City, London and Reykjavik. Lives with no reason to ever cross. Will, a Chicago cop haunted by an unsolved murder. Sun, the daughter of a powerful Seoul businessman, and a kwan ki do fighter. Nomi, a hacker in San Francisco. Kala, a Mumbai pharmacist engaged to a man she doesn’t love. Riley, a DJ from Reykjavik with a murky past. Wolfgang, a Berlin burglar with a complicated family history. Lito, a Mexican action movie star hiding that he’s gay. Capheus, a matatu driver in Nairobi trying to get his mother treated.
Then one day, no explanation, no instruction manual, these eight people start sensing each other. Not seeing each other on a screen, feeling each other. One person’s emotions run through another. One person’s pain becomes everyone’s pain. The joy too. The fear too. A cluster, in the show’s vocabulary. Eight individuals who suddenly make up something like a single mind spread over several continents.
What hits you right away, and what sets Sense8 apart from everything being made back then, is the flat refusal to take the easy road. The Wachowskis shoot in Nairobi for real. In Seoul for real. In Mumbai for real. Not on a soundstage rebuilt in California, not on a cardboard set with two extras and some background music meant to pass for local color. Every character lives fully inside their culture, their language, their daily reality. The show breathes the world. It smells like Berlin asphalt and Nairobi heat and Mumbai density. Across sixteen cities and thirteen countries, the directors built something that amounts to a real look at human diversity. Not diversity as a marketing angle, not diversity as a quota to fill so the critics calm down. Just diversity as a plain fact, as raw wealth, as the raw material of a story that couldn’t exist any other way.
And then there’s what the show says without ever saying it. The Wachowskis are trans. They know what it’s like to live inside an identity the world refuses to recognize, in a body society would rather erase or correct or just shut up for good. That experience runs through Sense8 from end to end. Not only through Nomi, the trans woman whose arc sits at the center, but in the architecture of the show itself. Eight characters with nothing in common, tied together whether they like it or not, learning to inhabit a life bigger than the one their surroundings handed them: that’s a metaphor about identity, about what it costs to be yourself in a world that would prefer you were something else.
With Sense8, empathy becomes a devastating political weapon
Sense8 doesn’t do politics in the ugly sense of the word. No speeches. No manifesto. No character explaining to the viewer what to think. The Wachowskis are way too smart for that.
What they do is infinitely more subversive. They show what happens when human beings stop seeing themselves as separate individuals and start feeling somebody else’s reality. Physically. In the gut. When somebody’s pain in Nairobi becomes your pain in Berlin. When somebody’s fear in Seoul wakes you up in Mexico City. Empathy stops being an abstract value you wave around in a speech. It’s a concrete experience, so you can’t deny it.
And that’s where the show gets dangerous for the established order. Because a person who can really feel what the whole human race feels gets very hard to manipulate. Because racism, nationalism and hatred of the other only thrive on one condition: never actually feeling what the other person feels. And Sense8 pulls off the trick of blowing that condition up at the root.
In the end the cluster doesn’t survive because it’s ideologically aligned. It survives because it’s radically diverse, and that diversity is its whole strength. Each one brings what the others don’t have. Will the Chicago cop brings his sense of duty. Sun the Seoul fighter brings discipline and force. Nomi the San Francisco hacker brings brains and cunning. Capheus the Nairobi driver brings courage and optimism. Riley the Icelandic DJ brings empathy. Wolfgang the Berlin burglar brings cold brutality when it’s needed. Lito the Mexican actor brings his ability to play any role. Kala the Mumbai pharmacist brings science and precision. Together they’re unstoppable. Apart they’re vulnerable. That’s a politics lesson few textbooks teach.
Netflix, or the art of not respecting your users
On June 1, 2017, with no warning, Netflix cancels Sense8 without even leaving room for a closing season. And yet the show is killing it! The reason is as simple as it is pathetic. At $9 million an episode it’s supposedly too expensive for the audience it pulls. In the platform’s capitalist logic, quality doesn’t matter, impact doesn’t matter and neither does the community built around the show all over the world. Better to make 10 garbage shows for the same money. Too bad about the 3 remaining seasons! Straczynski and the Wachowskis had planned 5 seasons to unroll the whole plot properly. The actors’ contracts were signed for 5 seasons. All of it got sacrificed to Excel spreadsheets made by people who understand nothing about art.
What happened next almost never happens. The fans flat out refused the decision. In under a month more than 500,000 people signed a petition. Social media was on fire. Fans all over the world organized screenings and wrote open letters aimed straight at Netflix. Multinationals hardly ever back down. But on June 29, 2017, barely a month after the cancellation, Lana Wachowski announced that Netflix agreed to produce a two-hour finale. It aired on June 8, 2018.
Lana Wachowski then wrote to the fans: “In this world it’s easy to believe you can’t make a difference. That when a company makes a decision, it’s final. But improbably and unpredictably, your love brought Sense8 back to life.”
It wasn’t the dream ending. Just the bare minimum to grieve the show a little more calmly. Lana had a very clear vision over 5 seasons and a two-hour episode couldn’t replace 3 whole seasons. But it’s an ending at least. So let’s call it half a win.
What if Sense8 was an allegory for the Fediverse?
On one side you’ve got a fiction with eight people who have nothing in common. Language. Continent. Culture. Social class. Gender. Sexual orientation. People who in real life would never have had the slightest reason to meet. Because a Chicago cop doesn’t spontaneously call a hacker in San Francisco to see how she’s doing. A Korean woman practicing kwan ki do doesn’t share breakfast with a Berlin criminal. Normally these are sealed worlds. Airtight bubbles. Parallel lives that never touch. And yet something happens. A connection. Brutal. Unexpected. Not chosen. Nobody asked to join that cluster. Nobody clicked a “sign up” button. Nobody checked a box saying “I want to feel the pain and the joy of a stranger on the other side of the world.” It happened, that’s all.
On the other side you’ve got the Fediverse… Ring a bell? People all over the planet. Different languages. Different cultures. Different skills. A decentralized infrastructure that belongs to nobody and to everybody at once. On paper it’s exactly the same cluster. Exactly the same promise. Exactly the same potential. The only difference is that everybody signed up to be interconnected. So why doesn’t it play out like Sense8 when every condition is met?
The Fediverse, a perfect tool that doesn’t shake us up enough
Let’s ask the question calmly, between friends. We’re not here to pick a fight, we’re here to move forward. Technically the Fediverse has everything it needs to bring progressive projects together. No Big Tech. No manipulative algorithm. No ads. No billionaire boss deciding what you see and what you don’t. Instances run by people like you. An open protocol anybody can implement. It’s gorgeous on paper. It’s even beautiful in practice on plenty of fronts.
So why do we still end up with infinite scroll that goes nowhere? Why the same chase for boosts and favorites as on the Big Tech networks? Why does trending always push the same big accounts? Why do most users consume passively instead of creating, sharing and talking to each other?
Compare that with the show this article is about. The sensates didn’t pick their cluster. Lana Wachowski wired them together at random. Without that, they’d never have taken the initiative to follow people completely outside their world. And that initial chaos is exactly what set everything off. It forced them out of their comfort zone. It made them find out that a total stranger, different in every way, had exactly what they were missing.
On the Fediverse, who do you follow? People who think like you. Your friends, maybe. Plus the big accounts trending shoved under your nose. So you built your bubble on free infrastructure the same way everybody else built theirs on the commercial networks. And the result is that it mostly runs in closed loops. To get out of it, I think there are two important questions to ask. Is the tool the problem? Or are we the problem?
The Fediverse, how do you get out of your bubble without a gameable algorithm or AI?
The Fediverse has a trending feed. That’s fine, knowing what’s trending matters. You find good stuff there. But trending is the opposite of random. Trending on its own only amplifies what already exists. It pushes the people who already have a big audience. It’s a star system. A kind one, maybe? Sometimes a good one. Still a star system.
And next to that? Nothing. Thousands of extraordinary small accounts posting into the void. A developer in Senegal. An activist in Vietnam. A Ukrainian farmer documenting life under the bombs. A Brazilian hacker building free tools. Your future cluster doesn’t have the right conditions to hatch.
The tools are there though. Plenty of instances already have discovery features. The problem isn’t technical. It’s a UI problem that wrecks the UX. The functions exist, they’re just buried, badly surfaced… and so ignored.
Meanwhile the small accounts settle for the role of spectators. They wait. They hope. And when nothing comes they get discouraged. They go somewhere else. Or worse yet, they stop. They’re the ones who keep a network alive. Big accounts pull people in. Small accounts build. A network with no active small accounts is a stage with no audience. A cluster with no new members is Sense8 without seasons 3, 4 and 5.
So why not actively push users out of their bubble? Say, by offering them 3 random accounts to discover every day, out in the open. Not buried in a menu. Not as an advanced option, but right there in the feed as a message. Can that be done any old way? No. Nobody wants accounts pushed at them that don’t match the community’s standards. So a minimum trust score is a must.
The answer isn’t artificial intelligence. It isn’t a sophisticated algorithm. Just a basic feature. Pure random with a bit of common sense. You click. You land on somebody you’d never have run into. Maybe it doesn’t interest you. You click again. Maybe this time it’s the start of something…
And beyond that, couldn’t we imagine other tools to get the network moving? It’s just a question. And a debate we’d love to take part in constructively.
From the generous indie web to the individualist web
The further I get into writing this article, the more I wonder how I went from Sense8 to the Fediverse. Let’s rule out drugs 🙂 To really get what’s going on, I think I need to share a few personal things. I threw myself into the Indymedia adventure from the very beginning. It really was a fabulous time. Some colleagues and I even started a local chapter with open weekly public meetings, IRL, to get people fired up. We moderated, we published. Sometimes local, sometimes global.
More than that, we lived in a time when we checked the online calendar regularly to see what was announced, and we weren’t scared of putting in miles by train or by car to get to a no border camp. And it was dead easy to launch an event, a Linux install party or anything else tied to alternatives. On top of all that, questions of gender or sexuality were pretty much a non issue among us. That lasted a few years, and then I needed a break from Western society, so I went to live in Africa for a long stretch. I was plugged into what I was doing there, so I’d pretty much dropped the web to give everything to physical alternatives. Easier to do since the connection over there was discouragingly slow.
Then I came back to Europe. And I didn’t understand what could have happened during those years away. Even before Indymedia I was already in the indie web. It was pretty much all I knew. For one simple reason: I saw the alternative web as a great way to free ourselves from capitalism. I’ll admit I daydreamed countless times about what the web would look like in 10 years. With all those people connected across the world and all that technological progress coming, I was deeply convinced it was only a matter of time before we tipped over into a society worth living in. Instead, when I came back I felt like the main character in Idiocracy. I was in a world I didn’t recognize. Everything had gone backward. So I tried to piece it together and figure out what had gone wrong. I didn’t have to look long. Brilliant people I used to love reading on independent media or on their blogs were down to posting 140-character messages on Twitter. Others thought they were improving the world in Facebook groups. And me in all that? I thought, what the hell is this shit? How did we get here? But I also thought maybe I was the one out of step with the times. So I left for Africa again for a few more years and during that time I still had no appetite for diving back into the web.
Until I came back to Europe and found it had gotten worse. There’s no point lying to ourselves, Big Tech has pretty much wiped out everything that made the web intellectually rich. So I asked myself, what can you do at your modest level? Fight the enemy head on? Waste of time! Fight the enemy from inside, on its own networks? Ridiculous! Build an alternative? Now that was the good idea! Except the times had changed. The days when Google and the rest behaved normally were over. In this new web the room to grow an alternative was about the size of a mouse hole. But was the real problem Big Tech, or was it that mentalities had changed?
It didn’t take me long to see the problem. Mostly it was mentalities that had changed. Big Tech had done its dirty work well. Like culture had beaten sincere exchange by a mile. And on the indie web side, more and more people acted like plain consumers instead of participants. Do free support for open source and you end up getting yelled at! You didn’t answer fast enough? Your answer wasn’t clear enough for the person’s taste? You get yelled at! Publish on free media and somebody shows up with notes on your formatting. Hard to keep your cool! Because, shit! All of that is time, that’s resources committed… That’s not nothing! And through all of it, rarely a thank you. On top of that, fewer and fewer people willing to commit to free software projects. Unless it hits the front page of mainstream media, or it’s hype, getting a project off the ground is brutally hard. So the problem is clearly identified: the collective is broken. Because we’ve clearly entered the era of triumphant individualism. Sad to say, but that’s how it is.
Why such a lack of creativity?
Fascists aside, I like being around people from all kinds of backgrounds. Not necessarily the alternative scene. And sometimes a conversation drifts to social media. So I bring up Mastodon. Most people have never heard of it. So, being as honest as I can, I tell them it’s kind of a Twitter, only uglier. You see the problem coming or not? Coming from a movement that created the WWW, that created Linux, that created free software, that knew how to build powerful media in its day… you’d expect a lot better than a pale imitation of Twitter with Mastodon? Than a pale imitation of Reddit with Lemmy and its toxic downvote? Than a pale imitation of Facebook with Friendica? Where did the creativity go on the alternative side? That’s the question to ask. And the other question is: as a user, do I come to a Mastodon instance to read mainstream media in trending, or do I come to find collectives and good initiatives? For the rest, and I say this with zero animosity, if it’s to scroll endlessly through memes and cat pictures, what’s the point? What’s the difference between that and going to a Big Tech dumpster with a good ad blocker? I have a hard time seeing it. Am I saying memes and cat pictures should be banned? The answer is no. I’m just asking why an alternative network ends up working strangely like a Big Tech network. And above all, why doesn’t it play its essential role of bringing people together and generating human exchange?
What surprises me even more is that the ActivityPub protocol is really malleable stuff. And yet most of the sites using it tend to look like copy and paste jobs. We went a different way. I don’t know if we’re right or wrong. The future will tell. Meanwhile what matters most is that we’re having fun going our own way.
Either way we went against the current trend. Probably the punk side coming out 🙂 We started by imagining the social network that would best fit what we wanted. A small network with a family feel that encourages real exchange. Then we worked on something we’ll call our secret sauce for now. And now we’ve reached the stage where we’re going to plug into the Fediverse. By the way, if you’re a developer and you can lend us a hand, we honestly won’t say no 😉
But let’s be clear, at no point am I saying a free network has to look like this or that. Almost the opposite. I’m only saying that in social network there’s the word social. And that on the progressive side, more than ever, we really need tools built for different situations that give us back a real social bond. Which brings me back to Sense8 🙂 If that fiction could be a source of inspiration for developers, it’d be a real game changer.
Conclusion: one for all, all for one!
I’ve been at this a while. From experience I know this kind of invitation to debate always attracts a few sneaky digs. So let me get ahead of them and make things clear. NovaFuture has a Mastodon account and on the whole we’re pretty happy with how it’s going. We have followers who share our stuff and sometimes leave us nice messages. We also had a French-language Mastodon account we had to shut down because we didn’t have time to look after it. And we have a Lemmy account to make the switch away from that Reddit dumpster. Same thing there, we don’t really have time to invest the way we’d like. Personally, outside Mastodon, I don’t have social media accounts anymore because I find it either too toxic or a waste of time. And nobody else on the NovaFuture team is hungry for fame. We just chose to build this NovaFuture project and throw ourselves into it.
So now that we’ve covered the ground, how do we build another possible world? Because we all have our talent, our little bit of individual power. But alone, with a character limit to talk to each other, with the fear of the dislike, the fear of judgment, without the tools to find the right people… what are we? What do we do?… So let’s build connections, my friends, and move forward 🙂 We all have our flaws but hope brings us together. So, looking forward to meeting you somewhere on the independent web and see you very soon for new adventures.
If you enjoyed this article,
support copyleft and open source
and help us bring our projects to life.
