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The Fundamental Question: What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence?
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Motivating use cases:
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How do I memorialize every piece of content I've ever seen, so I can reference it again in the future? (No one can make me forget)
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How do I ensure I can always talk to someone else about a piece of information? Both in terms of referring to the information, and also in terms of what I can say about it?
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How do I ensure that only the intended recipient can view a piece of content? (Have to ensure they are using a secured client that makes a synchronous connection to me, that holds the content)
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Computer Networks vs. Social Networks
- Connection between entities is primary
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The role of decentralized communication technology in bringing about a new, sustainable human ecology
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The Internet Is Too Much
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Is the web a place for all people?
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Anomie (in Clipped Articles civ 2.0)
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Time to end the concept of "the media". Coherent, synchronized messaging turns humanity into a horse that awaits a rider. This is increasingly dangerous.
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To be a node in a sense-making network, you need tools that manage your information diet, along with explicit management of connectivity, identity, etc.
You should also be able to bookmark and mark up and mashup content without any fear that it might be leaked.
If you can’t explicitly manage your information sphere, then you are subject to the broader whims of the narrative sphere. And you also can involuntarily get co-opted into dynamic patterns.
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"Tone" or oceanic metaphor instead of "network of sites" (evernote)
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Hard problems
- "Novation Protocol" / Trust -> Reputation [see evernote]
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You don't "acquire users" in a Humane Network: (triggered by reading “Announcing the Status Network” https://blog.status.im/announcing-the-status-network-c6dd18e770e)
It is an antipattern to think of "acquiring users" in a social app. Rather, users entrust you with attention.
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Different root trade-offs:
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Internet ensures robust decentralized delivery.
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In absence of identity, very hard to build trust and communities.
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With centralized identity, aggregate extremely large amounts of power.
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New data topology: optimized to ensure decentralized identity, fluid organizations. Zero global copyright: data has no rights; data makers only have rights as stipulated by the trust network they inhabit.
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Principles:
- Connections considered harmful
- Trust, not bandwidth or storage or latency, is the core commodity. The Trust Topology is the most significant architectural concern.
- If the network is the computer, then users (and their usage) becomes the product. Data and metadata security are architecturally invalid.
Loomio seems very concerned with trolls. Let’s understand trolling conceptually, and build countermeasures into the platform.
Is it sufficient to define the conversation platform as an online community that is troll-proof?
Trolling takes different forms but mostly it seems like online communities are broken because the software platforms provide no -code- level way to communicate and enforce the elements of human interaction that exclude trolls IRL. People who troll IRL develop a reputation. That is a critically important aspect of this.
There is no such thing as anonymous participation: if an anonymous ID shows up and starts expressing amazing ideas, they develop rep, and are no longer anonymous. Participation itself is identifying; social identity and reputation are one and the same. So online tools that provide anonymity are simply choosing a naive and flawed implementation of certain other features, which include minimizing friction of getting new users.
Once persistent online identity exists, then we have a surface on which to attach things that make trolling non-existent.
Trolling is just burning people’s attention, using asymmetric informational psych techniques. If trolls have to spend 5 minutes crafting a message to waste 5 minutes of someone else’s attention, they would get nowhere. That’s why they gravitate to forums which serve as auto-repeaters to others.
We used to have small local spaces in which to raise our young, let them learn through risk (serendipitous autocorrect from "trial") and error, away from the eyes of the world. Reflecting on how I had to learn concepts and make my own mistakes in the company of friends and a supportive/forgiving community.
Now the eyes of the world can train upon any small local event, spark global outrage. This is allergic overreaction. Really one set of social patterns bullying another set.
Warcraft had lowbie training grounds.
We are not a global community. The would is a community of communities. And until we realize that our information technologies and architecture are at odds with that reality, we will continue to have side and chaos and informational warfare. The disruptions in sense making will continue.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40974069
This is related to the "free speech fundamentalism" where people treat the freedom of expression as an axiomatic right.
No such axiomatic right exists.
The internet is founded on the principle of end-to-end connectivity. The web is based on servers and content, and a universal addressing scheme in the document format.
The Humane Network primarily concerns itself with defining the set of concepts and protocols that give rise to a communications network which fits the natural inclinations of human interaction, and scales up and out without creating any number of potential negative outcomes:
- Loss of confidentiality
- Loss of attribution
- Loss of Anonymity
- Centralization of content
- Centralization of traffic flow
- Inappropriate novation of trust into global reputation
A trusted connection is 90%+ of the signal.
- A Pot-Belly of Ignorance (https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-you-spend-time-reading-changes-your-brain-ee2ab4f2aa17#.ljo3lq8zy)
Network intelligence requires attribution, and durability of long-term learning...
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the way the brain cements memory and learning is by applying it to action; to making predictions and when those predictions are right, it quickly reinforces the pathways that led to it
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this suggests that: (1) we need a way to do the equivalent of "acting" or "predicting" in an information network, which is difficult because thus far we've conceived such networks primarily as information dissemination mechanisms (2) we need to keep a provenance and attribute chain for how we came upon certain knowledge, and when those things feed into the analogue of "correctly predicted action", they get bumped up
So the Principle of Reciprocity in the information architecture could be manifested in users attributing that a thing is "noteworthy", and adding some amount of comment. Additionally, TTL/Duration could be configured by default to be smaller values for things which are merely referenced without comment.
There is a question of how to reinforce the concept of "long-term memory" in the collective intelligence. I believe that sleep is critical to formation of long-term memory in humans. Is it fundamental, or accidental, because our visual system was not effective at hunting at night, and so we might as well sleep?
- Need some dual concept of The Feed. Like, Archives or Deeps. Amazingly indexed, integrated, with full perspective and commentary.
- Foster a culture of developing deeper contextualization or filtering of new things, through the lens of the Archives.
- Things like Wikipedia and Quora demonstrate a huge amount of latent human capability for doing this. For instance, the excellent Quora discussion around the efficacy of the F-35: why isn't this naturally part of the Wikipedia "article" on the subject? Because of the artificial (and illiquid) concept of an "article" and the editorial/curation process.
- If people could get compensated for their expert contributions more "core" to the understanding of a topic...
A CIN is not a system for remembering; it's a system for selective forgetting (triggered by reading https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/)
- Search and index can be used for fast recall
- deciding what to filter out and ignore is the core problem
- the “binding problem” or “binding effect” in the collective intelligence network has to be an act of collective ignoring and focus
- in other words, attention is differentiated perception, paying much more attention to certain things than others, and at certain frequencies, and in some particular order.
- that ordering, and the frequency/temporal scales, define the subjective metaphysics of the qualia of the collective intelligence
CIN is also not a corrective action network, or a hierarchical intelligence network.
Part of the red State CIN is a certain amount of self-reflection to see what things will strengthen its collective narrative. A restorative force, so to speak. Others talk about this as "meme"-craft but it's no different a phenomenon than gangs tagging overpasses with spray paint. Tribal chanting in an internet era.
The Blue "side" is actually at a disadvantage when it comes to building new online tribalism, because it does not perceive itself as being under seige in that space. It does have lingering dominance in the broadcast information space.
Online networks every originate community without robust trust mechanism
And all robust trust mechanisms currently require tying out to real world identity or institutions.
Breakdowns of trust in online communities rely on adjudication or resolution in meatspace. The only exceptions may be in topical domains where there is very strong alignment between the community's values and vision, with some externally-held vision. For technical communities, usually "technical merit" or "adoption and use" serve as final arbiter.
Other online communities may fork and split and decohere. This can be hard to do real forensics on since the internet has grown up and evolved so quickly. We went from Myspace to Facebook and Blogger to Twitter in less time than...
So for a real networked digital community to emerge, thrive, and EVOLVE, then it must be anchored in some rock solid mechanism for connecting human identity. This mechanism - perhaps called the fountainhead of trust - is fundamental. Otherwise, online communities will always be the tail of the dog. And sometimes, as with Trump, the tail may wag the dog.. but it will still be the tail, and the dog does not walk backwards.
Unlike what many blockchain advocates and adherents may believe, the mechanism for ensuring trust is almost certainly NOT a purely online or digital phenomenon. Instead, it must be a mixed-mode, physical + digital experience, like a weekly mass or some such thing, wherein people then take digital communion.
Even if current internet providers put in short term "fixes" over the most dramatic division vulnerabilities their platforms have created for society, it seems pretty obvious to me (and many others) that central control of the Infrastructure for digital society is structurally problematic. In China, it does not even pretend to not be authoritarian. In the USA, we are still drunk on the religion of Growth Capitalism, but even appeals to the profit motive (Deus Ex Capital) cannot mask the sense of decline and social decoherence.
The point of this site and collecting ideas here is to explore, discover, and structure the principles that should guide the technical designs of a humane network, one that gives rise to and reinforces positive social dynamics within people, regardless of their cultural and political perspectives.
One of the primary brainstorming approaches I use is quite simple: given that our current tech trajectory is heading towards a dystopian Orwellian future, what sorts of tools and technology will I, my children, and my allies need in order to fend off Big Brother with his benevolent capitalism and debt indenture?
Different kinds of digital society infrastructure are appropriate for different societies. Just thinking about what the Raj period in India did for its infrastructure and organization. What new physical infrastructure and market arrangements would have arisen if it hadn’t been for (or, in fact, did arise in spite of) the initial build-out of this foreign architecture? Every type of culture and society at this point in time will squeeze into whatever kind of building is made for it; and it will change the building as much as the building changes it. The same applies for our digital infrastructure.
Right now we have seen what the global impulse-response to “digital commons built on ARPAnet” looks like. The vulnerabilities or flaws at the heart of the Internet architecture - a reliance on centralized namespace management and overemphasis on transport topology - manifest as different kinds of large-scale problems in different countries. In authoritarian regimes, the failure ranges from shut-down of the internet (LINK: when shut off the internet) to wholesale censor public communications, to exploitation of the infrastructure for human rights abuses (LINK: govt using Grindr to target gays). In the United States and western capitalist democracies, the propensity is towards creating an attention market, and exploiting it for the purposes of increasing consumer consumption and demand, to the detriment of mental health, physical wellbeing, and long-term survivability of our species. China is a strange hybrid that exploits the dynamics of an attention economy to create a veneer of a consumer internet, but underneath of which sits a powerful and omnipresent capability for fine-grained surveillance and control of the population.
The point of the new dataweb system is to put Identity as a first class concern in the data protocols, and for the intersection of those identities (joining) to occur on a human user's own terms. If we build a digital society, then we must have clear and ironclad rules about identity. Half of society is just defining what is identity; digitally-enabled societies are no different. If we were to draw an analogue to physics, identity isn't the equivalent of mass in meatspace; it's the coordinate system.
Technology should provide tools to extend the vocabulary of human interaction, and allow us to experiment with and scale out different kinds of social structures. It should amplify and implement aspects of human relationships, which are grounded in social primitives like trust, justice/fairness, social convention, etc.
Right now we have a broken system where this terribly primitive technology - a always-on, unencrypted, open metadata, glitchy graph of computers - is used as substrate for human interaction. And we are made dumber and more paranoid for it. Because we are limited in the range of interactions we can have, and there is zero affordances in the technology to support all of the cues and conventions that are so critical to real human interaction, the reliance of people on this network leads to an erosion and destruction of the social order which we are built to want, to expect, to intuitively understand. It's a more corrupt form of Orwellian "doublespeak", because there at least you could explicitly see the trick being played to limit people's expressiveness. The modern conception "social networking" does not fundamentally strengthen or augment those natural human social expressions; rather they are designed to create an attachment to a device, to an app or a site, lock-in to a platform.
Identity is a core one of these. Since we have no unified, federated, and robust mechanism for identity on the Internet, we have almost nothing to attach these social concepts to. This is why "hard anonymity" in the Internet sense tends to bring out the worst in people. The old "flight vs invisibility" thing - on the internet, anyone of sufficient skill can become almost invisible.
Then building on top of identity, we have trust and trust "paths"....
The Lagrangian of Social Physics is the delta between person's self-delusion and reality. “The man he is, vs. the man he wants to be”