When I presented pastagang back at ICLC almost a year ago, the most common thing people said to me was: “But what happens if someone comes and vandalises it? Or does something harmful?” and my response to that was always a mixture of “I don’t know” and “Maybe it’ll actually be easier to moderate that sort of thing because anyone can moderate! You don’t have to wait for the admins to come along and clean it up. You can do it yourself!”
And over time, I saw those moments on the strudel discord server differently: Those moments when someone in the community typed out something like “@Moderators please can you delete the message above me and ban the user?” and “@Moderators please can you change the server settings so that we can actually tag moderators” and I thought to myself “Pah! This would never happen in pastagang!!”
By making it easy for anyone to delete anything, it makes it hard for anyone to create anything harmful. Or at least, that’s the theory. It takes a lot of inspiration from robust-first computing, which provides an alternative to our usual hierarchical view of the world.
In the robust-first alternative view, all actors, such as you and me, have a huge amount of power over our surroundings. We can create and delete anything that we want! No one is in charge!
But also … because everyone has power, there’s nothing stopping someone else from immediately deleting something I create (or immediately recreating something I delete).
And importantly, we only have power over our immediate surroundings. We can’t take action at distance: We can’t affect the other side of the world, or anything outside our arms’ reach.
Even with these limitations, there’s still a huge risk of harm. A greedy forkbomb is one of the simplest programs to write: Copy yourself into everything. The End. It spreads into all available space and suffocates everything else out of existence.
In robust-first computing, the solution to this kind of problem is not about preventing the forkbomb from running or existing in the first place. The view is that you can’t possibly outlaw or antivirus your way out of it. There’ll always be a way to create this kind of program. That’s part of the deal with maximal close-up power.
Instead, the solution is about changing the rules of the simulation. Work instead on the laws of physics of your computation to put the odds in the “good” actors’ favour. It can be as simple as: Make “creating things” much harder than “deleting things”. You could do this by….. disabling pasting…. and disabling undo….. Does that sound familiar?
To some, it might be surprising to hear that “creation” is considered more harmful than “deletion”, but this really is the case!
Creation takes up space: It takes away resources and it brings order. It moves away from the anonymous safety of ambiguous noise into dangerous meaning. Deletion, on the other hand, makes space: It frees up resources and opportunity and resets things back to blank. There’s tranquility in nothingness!!
There was a problem with how we were running pastagang. We were unknowingly making creation much easier than deletion, which provided opportunities for both intentional and accidental harm. Let me explain:
If you delete the code repository for certain pastagang projects (like nudel)… the project itself would continue existing on its own, frozen in time, unable to be changed or deleted.
This has happened many times now: There’s a sneaky trick you can do to make your harmful change last longer. First submit your change, then wait for it to get deployed to the public, then immediately delete all the code. That way, there’s no way that anyone can take down your damage. Or rather, the responsibility falls on one or two people, rather than the usual 100+ member anti-hivemind that is pastagang.
One way of dealing with this problem is to take more direct action. Delete a project by running a distributed denial of service attack instead! This is what tools like anti-nudel are for. It does what it says on the tin. It keeps nudel deleted when other deletion routes are not available.
But direct action is much more violent and can lead to collateral damage. It definitely feels like a last resort. What else can we do?
Another lesson from robust-first computing is to limit each actor’s reach. Make sure you can only affect what’s in your immediate surroundings. Split pastagang into many different groups and limit the scope of each one. That way, you introduce redundancy and, more importantly, airlocks between projects. If one project gets vandalised, the others stay untouched.
Right now, we have “pastagang” (technically the 3rd iteration) and also “hardpasta” and also “slowpasta”.
Pastagang is serving as the front door and lightning rod for most vandalism. This is keeping hardpasta safe (for now). But it has meant that some pretty awful stuff has gone up on pastagang.cc recently. We had to take down the domain name to close it down at one point.
Hardpasta hides in obscurity. Its tools are intentionally hard to use and uninviting to passers by. There’s a certain enjoyable challenge in its aesthetic, but there’s also the huge obvious downside of not meeting our ethos’s expectations of inclusion and beginner-friendliness. It can’t go on like this forever.
Slowpasta is a new attempted solution at the vandalism problem for pastagang.cc, especially since we’re about to travel to AMRO to give a workshop and do a performance and pastagang.cc is linked on their lovely website! We can’t have it pointing to something terrible. So…
We’ll see how it all goes.
A note on names: I’m going for the “Adjective Pasta” naming scheme so far because I don’t want to call these groups “gangs”. The word “gang” makes it sound too much like it’s a club or a clique you can join. But it’s not. You’re already part of it. There’s no ego to gain by stealing it. There’s no ego to ruin by vandalising it. It’s [just] a thing that operates in a certain way. These are the rules. Or there are none. Whatever the case, this is how it is. Are you following so far?
back to the pastaverse