It’s more than facebook.

It’s CAPITALISM.

People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying “there is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...”

But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature.

You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition. Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways:

Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story.

MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc.

We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

No really, watch it. It’s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top down control by a small group of people, disseminating to everyone under the banner of “free speech”.

Act 2. Social networks are in a race to the bottom for advertising dollars.

So they adapt by desiging algorithms to maximize your “engagement” and attention on their platform.

Capitalism leads to a tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where in this case the commons is human attention. There is a reason that you salivate at notifications like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ve been conditioned to look at that screen light up during dinner. It’s NOT just about a slot machine dynamic. It’s that - if Facebook doesn’t get your attention every so often, then LinkedIn or Twitter would.

The solution is changing the economic model for news and social media.

Yes I said it. But let me use less triggering words than capitalism and socialism.

We need more projects built on collaboration instead of competition.

Wikipedia instead of Britannica

Workd Wide Web instead of America Online

Open Source Software instead of closed source commercial software

Cryptocurrency instead of banks

Creative Commons instead of Copyright

Prizes for Open Source Drugs instead of Patent System and IP

And so on. Not only would it make the system cheaper, it would make it far more effective and less divisive. People would be able to build on each other’s work, without threats.

This is already how peer reviewed science has worked, and for all its flaws it has produced tremendous progress. Scientists are careful not to overstate things. Titles are “boring” and descriptive rather than sensational.

Compare that to the “free speech” where money - and yes, audience size - determines which ideas get pushed in one direction. Clay Shirky spoke about this 15 years ago:

https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_institutions_vs_collab...

So how would it work?

There would be a wiki-like site for news. People around the world would upload their own videos and raw media.

Then each news story would be edited and re-edited by mutually distrusting parties, checks and balances, similar to Wikipedia’s talk page.

The final result would be published only after a delay, when most parties have had a chance to challenge all the claims they needed, with well sourced claims of their own (each claim would have its own page).

That way, the world can make up its own mind by using the collaboration of the crowd, on issues like what’s happening in Saudi/Yemen, with China and Uyghurs or whether Assad gassed his own people after winning with conventional weapons. As well as on issues of religion, science, health policy, and so on.

We are building something like this as a reference implementation. The domain will be Rational.app

If you want to be involved you can email me at “greg” at the domain qbix.com. I am happy to welcome people on the project who know Javascript or PHP and who believe something like this is needed. This would be an open source project.