SIGIR Futures Presents

JEDI SEIZE

Seize the Means of Retrieval

Today, a handful of large for-profit technology corporations exercise disproportionate power and control over our global information ecosystems. This concentration of power raises serious risks of capture of our platforms and their weaponization for mass surveillance and manipulation of public opinion, and is already being leveraged by both private and public authoritarian actors. These concerns are not hypothetical but grounded in ongoing instances of attempted censorship,¹ ideological imposition,² and information manipulation³ by state actors, as well as by private individuals^{4, 5} in the backdrop of the technology industry's emerging projects of technofascism.^{6, 7}

It is time for the information access (IA) / information retrieval (IR) communities—the fields of research that has played a significant role in the advancement of information systems such as search engines, recommender systems, and chatbots—to seriously engage with these concerns and collectively commit to designing and developing alternative infrastructure for public information access. The JEDI SEIZE initiative aims to build a coalition of diverse researchers and practitioners to develop tangible and substantive agendas for information access research and development in support of this goal.

What We Must Reimagine

The future of information access is decentralized and emancipatory. Our pursuit of that future is expressly political with the aim of realizing information access as a force for social justice, emancipation, and democracy. Our work is aims for digital solidarity between marginalized peoples across the globe engaged in shared struggles against colonialist, imperialist, and capitalist oppression.

We wish to move forward cautiously and thoughtfully, recognizing the incessant capacity of power and capital to co-opt well-intentioned endeavours. We do not believe that simply making technological artifacts open or inviting community members to participate in technology development without affording them real power leads to positive societal outcomes. Instead, we strive for a model of development where information access technologies are co-constructed by marginalized communities, empowering them to define and negotiate how they are represented by the algorithms, how their information needs are met, and how their data is safeguarded from exploitative extraction.

We confess that we do not know how to do this yet. But this is the task at hand. We are inspired by the exciting community-centered projects experimenting on decentralized social media, the Indigenous-led initiatives for data and digital sovereignty, and all other acts of technological resistance⁸ from around the globe. We intend to be in dialog with the people already doing the work, and build reciprocal partnerships and collective solidarity to reclaim our information futures. We believe that it is only collectively that we can make meaningful progress on the challenging questions in front of us that are simultaneously technological, social, political, and economic.

We foreground some of these questions below:

Decentralized technological infrastructure. How do we design distributed information access platforms that can run seamlessly and robustly over heterogeneous networks of globally distributed compute clusters? How do we separate the software layers from the compute hardware to ensure that access to hardware resources do not become the means for concentrating power within the ecosystem?

Decentralized social infrastructure for governance and moderation. How do we design democratic governance frameworks that explicitly make space for sociopolitical negotiation to make policy and moderation decisions within the platform? How do we make such negotiations equitable and emancipatory in light of systemic power relations between groups in society?

Decentralized platform development. How do we co-construct platforms with marginalized communities across the globe without centralizing the authority over their development process? How do we make space for meaningful deliberation and negotiation for decision-making within the decentralized development process? How do we facilitate the negotiation of normative values that shape platform design? How do we incorporate critical—e.g., decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-casteist, and anti-ableist—epistemologies and methodologies in the ongoing design and development process? How do we reconcile theory and idealism with practical constraints and outcomes? How do we "move slow and build things" while navigating ongoing technological and sociopolitical disruptions?

Responsible frameworks for privacy, consent, and data sovereignty. How do we develop responsible frameworks for handling both user data and web data that provides strong privacy, consent, and data sovereignty guarantees? How do we safeguard against exploitative value extraction from user and community data? How do we ensure that consent processes abide by the FRIES principles⁹ (Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific)? How do we ensure that our data processes respect individual and community ownership and sovereignty over their data? How do we separate discovery, which alerts searchers to the existence of items, from access, in which community grants access to data or information? And how do we facilitate access requests?

New interaction models and evaluation measures for a social-constructionist information paradigm. How do we model human-information interaction in a setting that rejects positivist assumptions about information and instead assumes that information and knowledge are socially constructed? How do we model the role of information access systems within social processes for collective sense-making and knowledge production? How do we develop new evaluation measures that concern with how information access systems help us grow our collective understanding of our physical and social environments and our relations with them, affect universal emancipation, and the system's robustness to capture?

Safeguards against capitalist co-option and extraction of platforms. How do we decide what aspects of the platform should be open and what aspects should be closed to adequately safeguard against co-option and one-sided value extraction by for-profit corporations?

Approaches for non-extractive monetization and equitable distribution of value. How do we develop adequate economic models for the platform? How do we make the platform financially sustainable in the long-term by developing non-exploitative and non-manipulative monetization mechanisms (i.e., no advertising)? How do we redistribute generated economic value to those contributing material resources and labor in the development and maintenance of the platform ensuring equitable and emancipatory outcomes?

What's Next?

We are working hard to design a process of engagement between practitioners and scholars from different disciplines to come together and collectively work on these questions. We hope to share more details soon on how you can get involved. In the meantime, if you are interested or curious, please feel free to get in touch with one of our program coordinators.