A Better World Online

Asked to ‘imagine a better world online,’ experts hope for an immersive digital environment that promotes fact-based knowledge, protects individuals’ rights, empowers diversity and provides tools for breakthroughs and collaborations to help solve the world’s wicked problems.

This is the second of two reports emerging from a “Future of the Internet” canvassing conducted in summer 2021 by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and Pew Research Center. 

This is my response below. You can read the full report here. 

In a nutshell: I hope to see communities that are supportive and not toxic. To be clear: This is a really high bar, and a lot of things have to fall into place for this to happen. There has to be an increase in productivity through automation, there has to be some measure of a more equitable distribution of wealth and there has to be social resistance to the politics of fear and division. 

Let me be clear that I do not think this is achieved by the creation of community through segregation. That has never worked. If we simply separate people into distinct interest groups, whether they’re based on language, religion, culture, favourite TV show, etc., we do not eliminate toxicity, because, first, these groups clash with each other, and second, because factions inside the segregated groups begin to develop and clash with each other. 

So, I do not foresee a segregated digital environment in the future. If we go in that direction then we have failed utterly to create something that is ‘new and improved.’

What I would envision is a ‘community of communities’ model, where there is an easy and fluid transition from one community to another, where a person can maintain membership in multiple communities, where communities are dynamic, self-organizing and self-forming, and where these communities are characterized not by barriers between ‘inside and outside’ but rather by the active connections and interactions between members (thus it becomes impossible for an outsider to disrupt a community, because there isn’t a ‘space’ they can invade, but it becomes easy for members to come and go, because membership requires nothing more than interaction).

Such a community is more like a circle of friends than it is a place, though the circle might habitually meet in a certain place. But what makes the circle work is that the members can build a community directly and select a new place if the old place isn’t working for them, or to arrange the timing of their gatherings so people can’t simply interrupt them, though the circle meets publicly enough, in an open place, so as to allow for serendipity and fluidity of interaction. This works only if there is more than one place they can meet, only if there’s a variety of different settings with different affordances, so they could meet at a cafe, a gym, a bar, a swap meet, a hockey game – whatever suits their interests and affinities.

In this network of digital circles of friends, people are not limited to talking and physical activities; they can play games, co-author documents, make movies, whatever. One of the attractions of TikTok is the way it has made these sorts of interactions (through, for example, the ‘duet’) seamless and intuitive. And in the ‘new and improved’ digital realm of 2035, these interactions and their outcomes create genuine benefits and impact; communities cooperating together can generate flows of resources to create social infrastructure, and their deliberations feed into, and become a part of, community decision making.

Many years ago, when I was first hired at my current employer, I used my inaugural lecture to pitch a concept of what I called a ‘budget simulator’ to capture this idea. To be sure, I was young and idealistic at the time, and thought it could really be implemented within my tenure. The idea was that people could join and each would get their own personal budget simulator where they could plan out the federal government budget: what would be taxed or collected, how much, where the money would be spent, and on what priorities. 

It’s the sort of thing that could start as a simple spreadsheet but become much more detailed as more people became interested and as people’s interests narrowed. The community part occurs where people contribute on given line items, given priorities, wherever. People can exchange ideas, argue with each other, negotiate, etc. They can draw on a sea of resources from economists, universities, Statistics Canada, and in these communities they can offer justifications or explanations for their particular decisions.

There are no ‘set’ communities, but rather, a fluid mechanism to create a circle around a topic (not through some formal process, the way Google+ set it up, but by simply informally interacting with each other). Obviously, people could influence each other, but there would be no way to influence everybody. An idea, to be successful, would have to pass through from context to context on its own. And, ultimately, each person would manage their own budget simulation, to whatever degree of detail they felt comfortable with. 

It’s not a ‘vote’ – it’s just an expression of preferences. It wouldn’t be a vote because there’s no real way to vote on budgets when there are so many different versions of the same thing. Each factor has an impact on the other; what revenues are collected directly impact what is spent, and different methods of collecting and spending impact what can be collected and spent, and so on. That’s why federal budgets are hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages long. 

But somewhere in there, there is a consensus – a way of expressing what would make the most people the most happy (or maybe there are several ways of doing this) and these consensus can be better and better known, and over time – even without a formal process – it becomes difficult to justify actually managing the federal budget in a way that varies from the consensus, and thus the budget simulator effectively becomes the decision-making body for the budget.

Now this is probably in the far future, but maybe by 2035 we have the framework of such a system; we have the self-organizing decentralized communities, and we have personal tools like a budget simulation engine, and we have moved away from centralized social networks.

By 2035 we can see how these systems could become the way we make decisions moving forward, not just on national platforms, but globally, and not just for finances but for laws and social policy generally. And we are beginning to ask what it would take to make such a system work effectively to reach good decisions. And we’re talking about education and open access to learning resources plus the ability of each person to be able to envision and work toward social policy that not only helps them but also helps others – what has been called in the past ‘enlightened self-interest’.