Mission

“Make social networks more humane”

I’m motivated by this goal of making social networks more humane. I usually try to explain it from three angles:

• Rebalance power to the humans, not towards platforms

Platforms should never have the power to de-platform users, and users should be able to modify and personalize the software they use to access the platform. This will only be achievable through malleable systems, a modern reincarnation of the Free Software movement: software should be easy to use, easy to change, and easy to share with others.

• Avoid authoritarian control and advertising revenue models

Facebook allows for authoritarian control fundamentally, because it’s centralized. A corporation can’t go against making money. If authoritarianism is both legal and profitable, there’s no way to stop authoritarian regimes from using all the information you provide them with. Social liberal democracies could regulate it, but it’s unrealistic, or really hard, to get companies (and individuals) to code/build something that is not aligned with the organization.

• Control our information intake

Social networks’ influence on our current lives is huge. Content delivery moves exabytes per day. The curation of this information we get is only going to be more critical as technology advances. We think that plurality, diversity, and inclusion must happen as we have evolved to: in small groups of people that you know and can trust (see Dunbar’s number). Being able to encode, understand, and explore the sources of your beliefs (whether they are rational or not) is a key ingredient of maturing our understanding of human culture and our control of information systems. Having privacy in this exploration is key for diverging thoughts (have you ever passed on using Google to avoid tainting your search history?).

Vision

Every day, I’m leaning more and more towards building an operating system/computer/language to empower software development to more people. Individuals should fully control the consumption of their information. These critical social network requirements should not really be impossible to get bundled into a cohesive world-class experience that respects the humans using the system:

• Messaging in all its forms (instant messaging, email, Twitter)
• Sharing content (news, blog posts, instagram, photos, videos)
• Searching for information (wikipedia, google, friend’s birthdays)
• Navigating the real world (maps)
• Media consumption (Spotify, Netflix, Youtube)
• Authoring (documents, spreadsheets, coding, CAD)
• Knowledge support (personal/social wikis)
• Identity, security, and infrastructure (vpns, backups, software, hardware)

Roadmap

I’d start by self-hosted personal and social clouds as a starting point. Your computers (phone, desktop, laptop, servers) should have a shared understanding of your reality and information, a subjective database of what’s “real” for you and your environment. This looks like a constrained internal network, where strong checks on data flows can be implemented to integrate and sync data across devices.

It should be a self-hosted language/OS like Smalltalk that makes it easy to build and share code socially. VMs running on top of it can allow interoperability with legacy tools and applications. Different ways of accessing that legacy data would be critical to bootstrap the understanding of the computer experience that users currently have: the base system could extract valuable information about user patterns and how they interact with computers on a day-to-day basis.

Cheers, Claude