Every day one sees more and more people waking up to the stupidity and malevolence of current online social networks. One even sees increasing talk about the need for better online social networks — ones that foster positive human experience and development, reasonable thinking and imaginative creation.
What I haven’t yet seen, however, is much real understanding of why our current online social networks are the way they are, and what might be done to fix them.
What we need to create a better social network, in my view, is relatively straightforward to state:
2. Ownership and control should be decentralized… so there is no company and no government tasked and burdened with calling all the shots. Embedding blockchain technologies deep in the technical design of the network is the right way to achieve this.
3. Major decisions should be made democratically. If some group systematically doesn’t like the outcomes votes are getting, they can fork the code and make a new version, or copy the code and create a new network using the same software.
4. Recommendations of connections and content should be made using AI that has the ability to explain the reasons behind its judgments — and these explanations need to be shown routinely to users in a way they can understand.
Due to SingularityNET and a variety of other recent developments, we already have the basic technologies needed to support this sort of approach — as far as tech is concerned, we could have decentralized, democratic, transparent and ethical alternatives to Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and so forth right now. We even have some existing websites — such as minds.com — embodying significant parts of the above.
What we still don’t have — yet! — is the alignment of resources to get alternatives fulfilling all four of the above points fully built-out … and then pushed toward wide adoption.
In this essay, I’m going to dig a bit into the collective-psychology implications of current centralized social networks and future potential decentralized alternatives. Given the key role that social networks currently play in channelling, guiding and crystallizing collective human thought and emotion, these are not just issues regarding the infrastructure of a particular technology sector — they may actually be critical to the future path of humanity.
The current mode of organizing social networks presents companies like Facebook with seemingly unsolvable problems. Should Facebook take down racist posts? What about posts with indirect racist implications? Posts explicitly aimed at affecting political elections using false information? What about questionable information? What makes information “too questionable”?
In relatively free regions like e.g. the US or Western Europe, government’s role in modulating public speech is restricted to extreme cases of directly dangerous speech (directly advocating violence, explicit forms of “hate speech” etc.). I believe this is for the best, as the alternative of giving government stronger control over speech has glaringly obvious failure modes — i.e. it can be used by fascist-minded government leaders to squelch the public dialogue needed to organize opposition to their rule.
However, less extreme, less directly dangerous instances of public speaking can also have a dramatic and systematically destructive impact on individual minds and the public mind — and in the current situation in the “free world”, these are being modulated by corporations in a very ad hoc way. And these corporations, run by digital marketing and tech geek types, are wholly unsuited to the subtle problem of modulating online information, knowledge and relationship flow for humanity. These organizations are optimized for delivering software and delivering ads and making money — not for guiding the public mind toward the broader good.
