What people in the global majority need from networks

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.

W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent. - We Can Just Do Things

Different politics, identical structure: wealthy insiders, community infrastructure they didn't build, and openness performed just long enough to matter. The establishment always wants its own internet.

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem

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…

Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.

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.

The perfect social network

What do most people want in a social network? We all have different ideas, but is it possible to have a set of features that makes everyone happy? We think so!

We need network societies, not network states — The Collective Intelligence Project

Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State posits a choice between reaction and stasis. A brighter future does not await through network states, but through network societies.

InnerNets - Make internet personal again

Our mission is to bring the right information to the right person, in the right way.

Rewilding the internet with ATProto

So far, many of the projects in the ATProtocol ecosystem have focused on bringing parity—making projects that replicate our existing tools and platforms, but with the affordances of the protocol instead. That's cool and we need to do that, but I think we can go much farther, and take this opportunity to challenge some of the biggest assumptions of what the modern internet is for, who builds it, and how we interact with it. This talk is in conversation with several of the talks from last year, and in I'll argue that we'll never get away from skeuomorphism until we've fundamentally changed the definition of what "the social internet" means in the first place.

Home - Nos: The Human Network

A decentralised mesh of communities and individuals built by and for the people. Nos is social media for humans, not algorithms.

A New Social

Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.

A New Social

Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.