Your Life is Driven by Network Effects

Institute of Network Cultures | Ben Grosser: Planning the Exodus from Platform Realism

Thinking about the current state of platforms, I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s articulation of capitalist realism, the idea that we don’t imagine or build alternatives to capitalism because we can no longer envision a world without it. Big tech, in a few short years, has managed to instill within the public a similar state of platform realism. So many are unable to imagine how global communication, media, search, etc. could ever function without the platforms. Despite a growing malaise, it’s become difficult for many to consider a world without big tech platforms as a viable conception of the future.

Social Networking Utopia — Matt

In discussing the network topology of social networks — whether centralized like Facebook or federated like ActivityPub — I think the ult...

The Wealth of Networks

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).

Entering the Age of Networks - Of Souls & Silos

Institutions are out, networks are in. What are the consequences, the perils and the promise? Originally published in The Orange County Register, March 5, 2015 Everyone’s interested in human networks these days. How to make them work, how to structure…

What people in the global majority need from networks

Or really, what some people in the global majority/Majority World need from networks, but that's too long for a headline.

The work at hand

I work on problems with networks because I am an ordinary person and I care about ordinary people. Sometimes caring about ordinary people means finding new ropes to pull on and throwing your weight into it. For those of us inside the US but outside the VIP lounge of American

The Internet Transition

The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.

AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?

The "Majority Illusion" in Social Networks

Individual’s decisions, from what product to buy to whether to engage in risky behavior, often depend on the choices, behaviors, or states of other people. People, however, rarely have global knowledge of the states of others, but must estimate them from the local observations of their social contacts. Network structure can significantly distort individual’s local observations. Under some conditions, a state that is globally rare in a network may be dramatically over-represented in the local neighborhoods of many individuals. This effect, which we call the “majority illusion,” leads individuals to systematically overestimate the prevalence of that state, which may accelerate the spread of social contagions. We develop a statistical model that quantifies this effect and validate it with measurements in synthetic and real-world networks. We show that the illusion is exacerbated in networks with a heterogeneous degree distribution and disassortative structure.