If you’re new here, we’re New_ Public, and we’re focused on creating flourishing digital public spaces. Welcome to our second Tuesday Open Thread! We miss reading magazines in coffee shops, and going to book readings, and so we decided to celebrate our first magazine issue by connecting the writers with the readers. Today’s prompt:
What do you want to ask our Decentralization Mag writers?
We’re hoping that many of you have read the issue (and if you haven’t, quick! there’s still time to get a question in) and that it’s gotten your mind spinning with ideas, not-yet-fully-developed-thoughts and questions about the rapidly evolving fringes of our internet lives.
Here’s your chance to ask our writers… absolutely anything about their piece.
And our magazine editor, Wilfred Chan’s “Introduction”
Please mention the author by their full name so they can jump in and answer some of your questions.
The first 25 people who drop a question will get a paper copy of the magazine mailed to them (whether your question is answered promptly or not). GO!
We are assuming that you, like us, are looking for more flourishing places on the internet. We want this to be one of those places! Please treat others with openness, generosity and respect.
My question is for Claire Evans (hi Claire! We worked on a project together at Vice a few years back. Great piece here!) How can we marshall the existing forces of this world to support the construction of more "Mother Trees" in the midst of The Great Trust Crisis? Trust in institutions is lower than ever--how can we ensure new online networks of care earn and keep the trust of people they serve? I am looking for practical advice and resources as I am now working in this space.
I'm fascinated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin's piece, Decentralized storytelling, from Native traditions to the metaverse. This sentence really captures the shift in what it means to be an "creator" of a decentralized storyworld:
"And he said, when he created this game, he would feel like a god creating a world. But now he just feels like a janitor, because the players are like, we demand this, we’ve organized and we voted. The players created their own tribunals, their own governance, and then they have their own systems of protests that they will do if they don’t like changes."
My question for Amelia is: for those of us who are interested in immersing ourselves in more of these worlds, who are some of your favorite "janitors"?
@Erik Nicolaus Martin what protocols are available for new social nets besides scuttlebutt. I've been reading hacker news posts about decentralized social media. I'm also interested in looking at DAOs and other decentralized ideas. I'm also fine doing centralized stuff as well. I want to build a climate social net. But it being decentralized would be a cool bonus. Any relevant reading on any aspect you can send my way, please do
Love the issue and all of your work! Question for Amelia Winger-Bearskin and also Eli Pariser:
I’m wondering how you would define the word “news”?
These two points really struck me:
-“Being a storyteller for the Seneca-Cayuga Nation is something that is a cross between being a historian, being a performer, being a creative writer, and being a leader within the culture.”
-“That way we have them distributed in ways that are not just left to a monolithic interpreter, which is assuming that people in the future will understand what they need to understand through books, or films, or whatever is the archive that we imagine will be the storytellers to the future.”
I’m a writer seeking how we can take back our relationship with the news (book project), and therefore seeking a new definition of it, far away from what was professionalized in Western media. (My working definition is sound, verifiable information that is new to you, and helps you make needs-driven decisions, no matter the source.)
But the richness of a decentralized view of communication makes me wonder what you’d think! What is news and does everyone get to spread it?
People often talk about "decentralization", but I'm not sure they are talking about it in the right sense. It's not simply decentralization of data storage, or dividing our lives amongst a few platforms to be more resilient to failure. The true solution of decentralization comes from solving the inequality of social power on central social networks.
One person can have 100 followers and another can have 10,000,000 followers. There is an inequality of control. It’s control of consensus, control of behavior, control of beliefs. It is not what is true, it is which truth has spread the farthest and fastest. Popular consensus is usually right, but when it’s wrong… it’s wrong bigly. Our problem is that we are TOO connected. Information moves too fast.
So, the question is, have you thought about how a system could be made/upheld/remedied? Can you speak to anything on this subject?
Hi! Magazine editor Wilfred here. Would love to hear any reactions you had after checking out the first issue of our magazine. A question I’m wondering about: should we have tackled crypto, blockchain, and “web3” discourse more head-on?
Thanks a lot Mary. You are definitively onto something. I have a 17 and a 21 yo and they are definitively fragmenting their usage of social media, not only with their usage of different platforms but also with different accounts in the same platform with different setting and for different groups.
Please consider adding a scroll bar to your site (newpublic.org). It helps to jump back to the top after reading an article and helps me visually gauge how long an article is and my progress within it (so it doesn't feel like an infinite scroll 😉). Thank you.
I'm not sure if this question is for editor Wilfred Chan or New_Public in general, or maybe the nascent community that's forming in this space: I love all of the pieces in here (especially Amelia Winger-Bearskin's!), and have been thinking a lot about Wilfred's points regarding decentralized power. I feel like a lot of these conversations, whether related to social media or AI or politics or "the news," miss out *geographical* decentralization. So many events, in-person conversations, creative work, etc., still happen in a very few urban locations. Which are great places! But I feel like entire societies suffer because people in less-populated areas feel increasingly like they're neither served nor understood by the various structures we have in place. This is a messy, rambling question, but how can these approaches to decentralization start to repair some of those connections?
Claire, assume the following network structure in terms of mother trees:
Our brains are limited to about 150 meaningful relationships at one time (Dunbar's Number) and our real social network is about 3 degrees away because information spread seems to drop off by then.
If we capped connections to 150, and limited to 3 degrees away of connectivity, the only variability of social power (emerging mother trees) would be if a user's network is more homogeneous versus heterogeneous.The mother trees in this structure could have a theoretical maximum of 3,375,000 connections whereas the average user would have maybe 500,000-1,000,000.
Would this be enough to differentiate a mother tree from a normal node, or is there a greater difference needed in order for a mother tree to be effective?
Hi @Mary Madden! Thanks for your article. What do you think of a dedicated layer over the entire web for young people where they know every person is a real person in good standing yet they can be psuedoanonymous at the same time? Basically the entire web becomes a social network with no unidentified bots, fake accounts, excessive trolls, serial abusers, or throwaway accounts...
Participatory and collaborative storytelling definitely seems to be on the rise with younger generations, and it seems more and more platforms are being built to support the curation and remixing of content between creators. At the same time, the "Passion Economy" is growing and more people are finding ways to make a livelihood by producing content and sharing their view on the world, which feels like it creates an interesting tension around ownership. There is the saying "good artists borrow, great artists steal" and - in an ideal world - artistic creations and stories wouldn't have to fit into a commodified model and could be freely shared without concerns about ownership and IP. However while we are stuck in a capitalist system, it makes sense that artists would choose to commodify their art and try to make a living from it. When it comes to collaborative storytelling (and producing collaborative content), do you have any ideas on how this tension might be solved? Are there principles from indigenous stewardship that could potentially apply to this problem of who "owns" content in an open data world, when much of our world's economic output is derived from that data?
You mentioned finding as early as 2001 that teens were exploring multiple personas, levels of privacy, etc by essentially decentralizing their use of digital platforms. This was definitely my experience at age/time. Have there been follow up studies on that same population? I’m curious to know more about how users age within (and alongside) digital space.
It's hinted that real-name-account millennial users are a lost cause, with more hope for radical change in the current generation of users. (I hope not, and I hope so!) I wonder...is it the fate of any system-challenging teen user to adopt a less critical, mainstream practice by their 30s or did web 2.0 and that particular time period present a substantially unique situation?
Question: We are surrounded by lists of information which are curated by algorithms in order to maximize company metrics such as engagement. Can we imagine more humane metrics?
Question 2: Do you know of any in-depth analysis of user interface alternatives to the list style-feed? Visualization has come a long way and we can use some of those advances to better display and process information. I'm just not aware of any experiments with non-list-style-feed.
This is a question to Mary Madden. I was fascinated by your description of how the relationship of teens with social has changed from being explorative of multiple identities, to be performative of multiple identities (the larger the audience the better) to be now more restricted to specific uses with specific people. Almost more utilitarian that identity based. Is that a possible reading of your article or identity is still very much at play
Hi @Claire Evans! What do you think of the canopy metaphor to inspire us to create a meta-layer on the web where people have a presence and content can be connected based on relationships? Being on today's web pages is like being lost in algorithmically weeded field of commercial timber. What if we could be in the canopy, looking down getting better view. In the canopy, there are people who came the webpage and entered the canopy. The canopy is interconnected and full of relationships. In the canopy, there can be contradicting and supporting bridges from pieces of content on the page to pieces of content on other pages. All this is possible with a meta-layer. Could the canopy help us envision the new public space?
My question is for Claire Evans (hi Claire! We worked on a project together at Vice a few years back. Great piece here!) How can we marshall the existing forces of this world to support the construction of more "Mother Trees" in the midst of The Great Trust Crisis? Trust in institutions is lower than ever--how can we ensure new online networks of care earn and keep the trust of people they serve? I am looking for practical advice and resources as I am now working in this space.
I'm fascinated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin's piece, Decentralized storytelling, from Native traditions to the metaverse. This sentence really captures the shift in what it means to be an "creator" of a decentralized storyworld:
"And he said, when he created this game, he would feel like a god creating a world. But now he just feels like a janitor, because the players are like, we demand this, we’ve organized and we voted. The players created their own tribunals, their own governance, and then they have their own systems of protests that they will do if they don’t like changes."
My question for Amelia is: for those of us who are interested in immersing ourselves in more of these worlds, who are some of your favorite "janitors"?
@Erik Nicolaus Martin what protocols are available for new social nets besides scuttlebutt. I've been reading hacker news posts about decentralized social media. I'm also interested in looking at DAOs and other decentralized ideas. I'm also fine doing centralized stuff as well. I want to build a climate social net. But it being decentralized would be a cool bonus. Any relevant reading on any aspect you can send my way, please do
The best piece I've ever read on decentralisation - https://reallifemag.com/reconnected/
Love the issue and all of your work! Question for Amelia Winger-Bearskin and also Eli Pariser:
I’m wondering how you would define the word “news”?
These two points really struck me:
-“Being a storyteller for the Seneca-Cayuga Nation is something that is a cross between being a historian, being a performer, being a creative writer, and being a leader within the culture.”
-“That way we have them distributed in ways that are not just left to a monolithic interpreter, which is assuming that people in the future will understand what they need to understand through books, or films, or whatever is the archive that we imagine will be the storytellers to the future.”
I’m a writer seeking how we can take back our relationship with the news (book project), and therefore seeking a new definition of it, far away from what was professionalized in Western media. (My working definition is sound, verifiable information that is new to you, and helps you make needs-driven decisions, no matter the source.)
But the richness of a decentralized view of communication makes me wonder what you’d think! What is news and does everyone get to spread it?
Hello everyone!
People often talk about "decentralization", but I'm not sure they are talking about it in the right sense. It's not simply decentralization of data storage, or dividing our lives amongst a few platforms to be more resilient to failure. The true solution of decentralization comes from solving the inequality of social power on central social networks.
One person can have 100 followers and another can have 10,000,000 followers. There is an inequality of control. It’s control of consensus, control of behavior, control of beliefs. It is not what is true, it is which truth has spread the farthest and fastest. Popular consensus is usually right, but when it’s wrong… it’s wrong bigly. Our problem is that we are TOO connected. Information moves too fast.
So, the question is, have you thought about how a system could be made/upheld/remedied? Can you speak to anything on this subject?
Hi! Magazine editor Wilfred here. Would love to hear any reactions you had after checking out the first issue of our magazine. A question I’m wondering about: should we have tackled crypto, blockchain, and “web3” discourse more head-on?
Thanks a lot Mary. You are definitively onto something. I have a 17 and a 21 yo and they are definitively fragmenting their usage of social media, not only with their usage of different platforms but also with different accounts in the same platform with different setting and for different groups.
Please consider adding a scroll bar to your site (newpublic.org). It helps to jump back to the top after reading an article and helps me visually gauge how long an article is and my progress within it (so it doesn't feel like an infinite scroll 😉). Thank you.
I'm not sure if this question is for editor Wilfred Chan or New_Public in general, or maybe the nascent community that's forming in this space: I love all of the pieces in here (especially Amelia Winger-Bearskin's!), and have been thinking a lot about Wilfred's points regarding decentralized power. I feel like a lot of these conversations, whether related to social media or AI or politics or "the news," miss out *geographical* decentralization. So many events, in-person conversations, creative work, etc., still happen in a very few urban locations. Which are great places! But I feel like entire societies suffer because people in less-populated areas feel increasingly like they're neither served nor understood by the various structures we have in place. This is a messy, rambling question, but how can these approaches to decentralization start to repair some of those connections?
Claire, assume the following network structure in terms of mother trees:
Our brains are limited to about 150 meaningful relationships at one time (Dunbar's Number) and our real social network is about 3 degrees away because information spread seems to drop off by then.
If we capped connections to 150, and limited to 3 degrees away of connectivity, the only variability of social power (emerging mother trees) would be if a user's network is more homogeneous versus heterogeneous.The mother trees in this structure could have a theoretical maximum of 3,375,000 connections whereas the average user would have maybe 500,000-1,000,000.
Would this be enough to differentiate a mother tree from a normal node, or is there a greater difference needed in order for a mother tree to be effective?
Thank you,
Alexander
Hi @Mary Madden! Thanks for your article. What do you think of a dedicated layer over the entire web for young people where they know every person is a real person in good standing yet they can be psuedoanonymous at the same time? Basically the entire web becomes a social network with no unidentified bots, fake accounts, excessive trolls, serial abusers, or throwaway accounts...
This question is for Amelia Winger-Bearskin:
Participatory and collaborative storytelling definitely seems to be on the rise with younger generations, and it seems more and more platforms are being built to support the curation and remixing of content between creators. At the same time, the "Passion Economy" is growing and more people are finding ways to make a livelihood by producing content and sharing their view on the world, which feels like it creates an interesting tension around ownership. There is the saying "good artists borrow, great artists steal" and - in an ideal world - artistic creations and stories wouldn't have to fit into a commodified model and could be freely shared without concerns about ownership and IP. However while we are stuck in a capitalist system, it makes sense that artists would choose to commodify their art and try to make a living from it. When it comes to collaborative storytelling (and producing collaborative content), do you have any ideas on how this tension might be solved? Are there principles from indigenous stewardship that could potentially apply to this problem of who "owns" content in an open data world, when much of our world's economic output is derived from that data?
Hi, this question is for Mary Madden.
You mentioned finding as early as 2001 that teens were exploring multiple personas, levels of privacy, etc by essentially decentralizing their use of digital platforms. This was definitely my experience at age/time. Have there been follow up studies on that same population? I’m curious to know more about how users age within (and alongside) digital space.
It's hinted that real-name-account millennial users are a lost cause, with more hope for radical change in the current generation of users. (I hope not, and I hope so!) I wonder...is it the fate of any system-challenging teen user to adopt a less critical, mainstream practice by their 30s or did web 2.0 and that particular time period present a substantially unique situation?
Hello! My question is for Sara Hendren:
Question: We are surrounded by lists of information which are curated by algorithms in order to maximize company metrics such as engagement. Can we imagine more humane metrics?
Question 2: Do you know of any in-depth analysis of user interface alternatives to the list style-feed? Visualization has come a long way and we can use some of those advances to better display and process information. I'm just not aware of any experiments with non-list-style-feed.
This is a question to Mary Madden. I was fascinated by your description of how the relationship of teens with social has changed from being explorative of multiple identities, to be performative of multiple identities (the larger the audience the better) to be now more restricted to specific uses with specific people. Almost more utilitarian that identity based. Is that a possible reading of your article or identity is still very much at play
Hi @Claire Evans! What do you think of the canopy metaphor to inspire us to create a meta-layer on the web where people have a presence and content can be connected based on relationships? Being on today's web pages is like being lost in algorithmically weeded field of commercial timber. What if we could be in the canopy, looking down getting better view. In the canopy, there are people who came the webpage and entered the canopy. The canopy is interconnected and full of relationships. In the canopy, there can be contradicting and supporting bridges from pieces of content on the page to pieces of content on other pages. All this is possible with a meta-layer. Could the canopy help us envision the new public space?