Quote from: MJK_Anfaenger on April 03, 2018, 09:00:32 PM

Ben, thanks for the informative, yet chilling insight. I'm feeling a bit naive right now, not because I didn't know most of what you posted (I didn't), but because I could have known if I had really bothered to find out.

Do you think that platforms such as those that you described will become a reality in our lifetime? I imagine something drastic has to happen before people reject the convenience of conventional social media and adopt a technology that today is considered somewhat of a nerdy niche-thing. Hmm, then again, so were computers and the internet 20 years back.

Hi MJK_Anfaenger,

No need to feel naive -- the large corporate interests that study and track all of us have invested a lot of effort into obfuscation. However, I do think the phenomenon of realization is similar to those images such as this one here:

Once you see both sides of the image, it is very difficult to "unsee" them.

Usability of social media is a big factor, of course. Technologies have to be accessible to people of below-average intelligence but yet not be tedious for those on the high end. Websites of 20 years ago were generally a lot less capable, rough around the edges, and were nowhere near as a ubiquitous as they are today. Similar leaps will be made in decentralized technology. Increasing bandwidth, storage, and processing capacity means that less centralized systems can better exist. Clearly, a distributed ledger is less efficient in terms of the resources that it consumes; however, it is the best tech known to humanity for certain applications.

Decentralized systems, beyond distributed ledgers like blockchain, enable gains in efficiency in other ways. For example, I often think about how much electricity is lost in transmission and distribution (the amount varies due to various factors but in some cases can be over 30% of power generated). I also think about the losses from utilities being unable to store unused electricity (well, at least not very much of it). When you start to combine technologies such as IoT to intelligently monitor power usage, microgeneration plants that could be distributed and spun up and down on demand to respond to near real-time changes in usage, and some good next-generation power storage technology, distributed power generation makes sense and could work to deliver electricity more efficiently than the large power generating plants we use today. Those plants would still be used, at least through their useful lifetimes, but they would generate the baseline amount of electricity, with microgeneration being used to cover variability.

Concerning social media, in my view, the trick is to build your tech and then make it go viral. Don't rush, keep iterating and improving, but always be ready to scale. You will hit the adoption tipping-point. Make great partnerships with top-tier content creators. Stay agile and adapt to changes quickly. Consumer-facing services are always heavily driven by marketing, but new-generation services come in waves. Think MySpace -> Facebook. This progress will continue. I believe the tech we're building in our Disperse.Network project can grow into a great service. The combination of multiple genres of social media (e.g. like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope) into a single service has opportunities for interactions that can't meaningfully happen today. Not everyone will understand the other parts that are the most important to me -- owning your data, strong encryption, better compensation to content creators, ethical revenue models, open source, etc. -- but I do think that most users can understand better privacy and control over how information is shared, the fact that they will not be tracked or profiled, and that content cannot be censored by a central gatekeeper corporation. "Community consensus" is an interesting challenge when you consider all the variables that need to be taken into account, but it is something that happens in the physical world among groups of people, so I accept that challenge and want to drive the tech forward. There are some great projects out there that do parts of what I envision. I'm looking forward to working with them to build a "whole" that is greater than the sum of the parts. When this project's white paper is written, I hope to be able to communicate the vision more clearly than I can now writing this reply.

I strongly believe that societal attitudes, economic factors, and technological capabilities have combined at this unique time in world history. Never before did we have the capabilities to communicate with people across the globe instantly. We've all witnessed things that "didn't feel right" but couldn't tell others about that experience. We couldn't see the way that, for example, the news media manipulates us, because the process of knowledge sharing and building upon other's discoveries and experiences were hindered by intermediaries. So even those that did see it and could articulate it were limited unless they were one of the lucky chosen that had a television, newspaper, or radio audience. (And those people aren't the ones that get chosen.) We now have an awareness of the flaws in the system as well as the technological means to go about repairing it. It will happen because it is the only sustainable course of action. The question is how long will it take, and will we have to sink even deeper before the inevitable recoil? More than anything, this is what drives me forward. The chance to truly make a better future for all of humanity, from here in New Jersey all the way to the remote parts of Africa. Humanity deserves it, and we can do it. So we shall.

Best regards,
Ben