From 96db5a611c64ac9c9822c32aff6b6ea7ccddbe91 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Wang Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 01:08:36 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] updating list of other projects; adding more text to sections 3 and 4 --- ...alized Social Media Is Broken By Design.md | 17 ++++++++++++-- 4 The Root Problems.md | 19 +++++++++++++++ README.md | 23 ++++++++++++++++++- 3 files changed, 56 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/3 Centralized Social Media Is Broken By Design.md b/3 Centralized Social Media Is Broken By Design.md index 4a13e22..168b4d8 100644 --- a/3 Centralized Social Media Is Broken By Design.md +++ b/3 Centralized Social Media Is Broken By Design.md @@ -106,8 +106,6 @@ We Need a Platform for Intersubjectivity * "we need a platform for intersubjectivity" [see evernote] - * Why does the question of morality arise when it comes to API design? [see evernote] - * Taking a more philosophical approach: Centralized Social Media has created a medium where intersubjectivity creates precipitates/artifacts with disorienting frequency. This is what Scott Adams gets wrong about Trump: They marvel at the "stupidity" of literalists on the left (and right) who merely receive the waves of media messaging and respond to them. Stimulus-response, you stupid libtard - don't you know you're being trolled? Facebook, Twitter drive all their revenue from monetizing attention. They can only do that because they are gateways. (Compare with web portal business model from the 90s) @@ -118,6 +116,21 @@ We Need a Platform for Intersubjectivity If FedEx started shipping mailbombs between people, how many nanoseconds would elapse before they shut everything down to figure out what happened? Infobombs are worse, because the damage is long term and structural and invisible. + * Does the feed train us for shallowness? Optimizing for outrage instead of insight + +The attention space of a society is a Commons +--------------------------------------------- + +Although it is always found to be extremely lucrative that is precisely because it's hard scarcity. It can be exploited for great gain by any communication technology or vendor or platform. Typically the standard means of exploitation of the attentional commons is through advertisement. More indirectly it can be profitable for people who wish to influence government policy and social directions. + +But this exploiation always comes at some cost. That cost also is typically invisible because it is generally the opportunity space of new possibilities for creative expression, collective sense making, and transformational ideas. + +Entities or businesses that monetize some amount of attentional space are driven by simple economics of scale. Like any good producer or vendor they wish to homogenize the raw materials, standardized processes for converting those raw materials into final product, and reduce the cost of inventory and transport of product to the end customer. In all cases with communication vendors, humans are the source from which the raw materials (attention) are gathered, and the customer is always some other entity (usually not a person) that wishes send a message or a signal to a mass of people. + +It is not difficult then to understand why communication technologies and their commercialization evolve the way they generally do. Very seldom do customers who wish to influence people have a finite Target Market in mind. In almost all cases, even if the advantages of their product has been broadcast to every single possible person that wishes to consume the product, there is always further advantage to be gained by reducing regulatory or social barriers to the business. This might be something as specific as environmental legislation or safety regulation, or something as general as lower tax rates or altered dynamics of the labor market. + +From this perspective one can see that the mere act of bundling attention - which is ultimately finite based on the number of living souls and waking hours available on planet Earth - that mere Act creates a power which cannot be anything but exploitative unless explicit external controls are put in place with regards to the use of such an aggregated channel. Furthermore any society that allows for such harvesting of attention within it exposes itself to (at best) wild variations and fluctuations in social temperament, and at worst to total exploitation and colonization or control, usually by trans-human entities. + Further Reading --------------- diff --git a/4 The Root Problems.md b/4 The Root Problems.md index 54d2750..3ddfafa 100644 --- a/4 The Root Problems.md +++ b/4 The Root Problems.md @@ -45,6 +45,25 @@ Internet is based on principle of "intelligence at the edge, network is dumb". F But for a *network of humans* in a society, this is completely, totally backwards! The social graph *is* the value that amplifies the intelligence of all of the individuals within it. This is the core motivation for taking a completely different tack for envisioning the future of a Distributed Information System. +Why does the question of morality arise when it comes to API design? +-------------------------------------------------------------------- + +It’s not like we’re making heat-seeking bullets that only target children, it’s just functions and data being stored in a database over here instead of over there… + +The reason is because the technical architecture directly lays out what is and isn’t possible for application design; and when we build apps in certain ways, we separate users from their data, and get to deeply inspect their every action. This is especially pernicious when the apps are used as the medium of communications between individuals in their *private* lives, where they have deeply personal and intimate interactions with their friends and loved ones. + +With “social sharing” sites like Instagram, we’re training a new generation to literally be attention whores: giving up what should be their intimate lives, to power inferential engines owned by the largest companies, so that they get debased and artificial “social currency”. + +The cost of this to each individual, and to society at large, is not typically contemplated. But it is vast. We are raising an entire generation of children and teenagers on a sugar diet that displaces all else in their lives. We are force-feeding this same sugar down the throats of adults who are old enough to know that this doesn’t feel right, but don’t know how, as individuals, they can stop the spiral of social regression and private degeneration. + +Our private selves matter. + +Consider this simple nuance of software or API design: the visibility of the To: field in email. If SMTP had been designed with BCC as the default, what would our communications patterns look like? Alternatively, what if email included an explicit list of all the people who could see the email? What if read-receipts were always sent, and could not be turned off? What if people could set a quota on how many emails they accept in a day, and senders had to bid on inbox access, and receivers could set different rates for different sender classes? Etc. + +Software for human communications is extremely subtle. + + + Further Reading --------------- diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 2d44b26..08d2139 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ If you are already convinced that the current Internet/web is broken, you can sk ## Contents 0. [Introduction](0%20Introduction.md) + 1. [The Web In 2017 - Structural Failure At Every Level](1%20Web%202017.md) * A Beastiary of Obvious Failures * The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism @@ -40,12 +41,32 @@ If you are already convinced that the current Internet/web is broken, you can sk 7. Beaker and Dat 8. Appendix A. What About _____? - * ZeroNet + * ZeroNet / Zero platform * Matrix * IPFS * Fermat * Urbit * Ethereum (and ether-related, e.g. https://www.uport.me/) + * SAFE network + * Blockstack + * Mastodon + * I2P + * DAOStack / Backfeed + * Consensys + * DFINITY + * cjdns + * Solid + * Syncthing + * WebTorrent + * StrongLink + * Twister + * Indie + * Cicada + * RetroShare + * Sovrin.org + * Xanadu + * FutureOfText.org + * [Akasha](https://blog.akasha.world/2018/02/10/akasha-beta-emergence/) (on Ethereum): * (Hardware stacks)