We do indeed.
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Ok, spill the beans, what are you up to? 
Everything public can be found here:
We’re going to start releasing more information and a couple of whitepapers soon.
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Ugh, Synereo is not what I want to see. “Money controls the system” is destroying our world, and my vision is different from this.
How did you get the impression that “money controls the system”?
@Elokane I’m referring to the paid promotion described in your link.
That’s advertising, or given its correct name, propaganda, which is a means of influence and control available to those with the money to decide what messages dominate, and which are drowned out. IMO it subverts choice, democracy, and concentrates power, to the detriment of humanity, and is why I’m backing ProjectSAFE.
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@happybeing I think the Synereo team agrees with you entirely about the subversive and inhumane consequences of money as a dominant influence on our social networks. It certainly isn’t our goal to recapitulate the existing power dynamics in a new medium, nor do we want to simply create a new caste of haves and have-nots to rule tyrannically over a new digital domain. Our goal, first and foremost, is to put the people in control of their own social networks, and to give them the tools to self-organize their social spaces as they see fit. That requires choice and democratic consensus. Introducing pay-for-play dynamics into democratically self-organizing social spaces is both cognitively and ethically corrupting and must be treated with all caution. On these points I think we’re on the same page.
However, I think the issue of “advertising” is somewhat different. We’re developing Synereo towards a vision of managing the economy of attention; advertising is really a way of managing the flow of collective attention. We might conceptually distinguish the role of advertising from the dynamics of capitalism by looking to nature. Consider, for instance, a flower’s petals or a peacock’s feathers. We might see these as beautiful, but they’re really just a form of advertising: bright, loud, attention-getting signals to attract potential bees or peahens (respectively) looking for the wares being peddled. When my yard in the summer is gently lit by lightning bugs. I think it is soothing, but it’s really just a public OK Cupid for the bugs. if I were a fly in the same yard it’d appear to be lit up Las Vegas in the 70s and I’d probably be slightly annoyed.
My point is that one person’s advertising is another’s boasting success. In the human domain, consider Crossfit. The only “ads” I see for this service are my friends and relatives on FB boasting about their training. I’m not interested in the service at all, but I am (mildly) interested in the success and well-being of the people in my network. Is this advertising or just social networking? The line starts to become blurry.
A strict no-advertising policy, if followed through, would require that people don’t talk about the products and services that they have found to have a positive (or negative!) impact on their lives. In other words, restricting advertising is ultimately restricting social discussions of our economic environment. So, from the perspective of the attention economy, getting rid of advertising is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Advertising isn’t the problem. Advertising is just the way we let people know about the things we’re able to do, how we’re different from others doing the same thing, so that others have the information necessary to make the best choice. In other words, advertising is one of the mechanisms that underlies the social division of labor. It creates the conditions in which people can make free choices and come to a democratic consensus. This only becomes manipulative when used to perpetuate the disparity of wealth and modes of domination that describe our economy today.
Instead, at Synereo we’re figuring out ways of mitigating the influence of money so that the natural organizing role of social advertising can serve its social function. We have details coming soon, but the basic idea is that value in Synereo is relativized to social context, so users have access to a variety of social filters that will pre-screen content for relevance. In other words, if you’re seeing it, then it is something that matters to you and the communities you participate in. That might end up being something that looks like a manipulative piece of propaganda, if that ad is something that actually matters to your network-- like a new Star Wars trailer or info on an upcoming protest.
The bottom line is that content can’t be cleanly divided into advertising and nonadvertising. It can only be divided into relevant and irrelevant. It’s that latter distinct that we’re working hard to get right.
Sorry for the very long reply. It’s an important question! =)
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I’m glad you feel we’re on the same page, but metaphors are never sound ways of determining issues. Their value is not to convince, but to convey an idea. Flowers in your yard are not even close to working like advertising. Where’s the money in this metaphor?
Perhaps it’s in the nectar fueling the insects and the nutrients for growth of the plants. Each flower is the culmination of a massive amount of “proof of work” by each individual plant, and advertises a genuinely valuable benefit to those insects - the life giving energy. Putting out flowers doesn’t obtain the means (sunlight, water, nutrients) to put out even more flowers.
Flowers and insects are part of a sound “economic” system, balanced carefully to ensure the survival and well-being of both, in an otherwise incredibly hostile environment.
You use this false argument to excuse the ability for those with money to “manage the flow of collective attention” in order to obtain more money:
“managing the economy of attention; advertising is really a way of managing the flow of collective attention.”
Your “vision” is for money to be able to “manage” my attention, in fact the attention of the collective. At least you’re not hiding the sinister nature of advertising.
How you square that with this, I don’t see:
“Instead, at Synereo we’re figuring out ways of mitigating the influence of money so that the natural organizing role of social advertising can serve its social function.”
If this was your goal, I’d expect you to ensure that the means to promote is disconnected from the ability to make money. Clicking “like”, or taking the time to write a post or a tweet, are mini-proofs of work, they reflect the values of the collective. Paid for likes, like paid advertising, override the values of the collective.
The problem arises when promotion can be bought, and promotion is used to create profit. That’s a closed feedback loop, and that is unstable, and why our society is currently riding high on a wall of death. Decentralised systems and disintermediation provide an opportunity to break the loop, and create a stable economic ecosystem before the ride collapses and takes billions of humans with it. For us to coexist with each other, like the bees and the flowers.
I’d love Synereo if it was part of that.
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@happybeing Perhaps we’re starting to find places where our personal politics differ. I’m not so quick to relate attention management to sinister ends. A crying baby is a perfect attention-manipulating machine, designed to irritate any nearby adult. The mere presence of the crying baby will have a huge impact on the local flow of attention, especially in a confined space like an airplane. Lots of people would rather that baby weren’t there. But it’s manipulation of the attention field is anything but sinister. The baby is manipulating attention, but the last thing we’d want is to get rid of the baby. Instead, we want to engineer the social system so that it is responsive to those cries and can generate a response quickly and efficiently.
Like a crying baby, advertising is also a way of manipulating the attention field. Again, I insist that this isn’t a bad thing-- it might be annoying and irritating, but it isn’t evil.
That said, you’re hitting on an important point:
If this was your goal, I’d expect you to ensure that the means to promote is disconnected from the ability to make money. Clicking “like”, or taking the time to write a post or a tweet, are mini-proofs of work, they reflect the values of the collective. Paid for likes, like paid advertising, override the values of the collective.
I agree with this, but I think the focus on “money” obscures the point so let’s be careful here. Your claim is that a “like” reflects the values of the collective, but that a “paid-like” overrides that value by reflecting the disparity of wealth.
But this is the challenge I’m claiming we can’t meet: how do you tell the genuine like from the paid-for like? For instance, say I’m given a free trial of some product which I subsequently like on social media. Was my trial offer a payment for that like? How can the network tell the difference?
To put the point another way, the paid-for like really does reflect the values of a collective, but it’s a different collective, representing traditional wealth and capital, and not the simply the social network I thought I was engaging. My “friends” on FB include not just my real friends but also all the advertisers paying FB to be my friend. And here we come to the real problem. It’s not that money corrupts the values of genuine communities. Rather, the problem is that money itself already represents a community, and that community is different from the one I’m engaging. Introducing money into any community transaction automatically makes the community of capitalist wealth party to all my transactions. And I agree with you entirely that this is something that must change.
Put abstractly: Imagine there are two groups, A and B. I want to engage A but not B. However, B is able to “pay” for advertisements to display around A’s activity. So even though I don’t want to engage B, I do so anyway through my engagement of A.
@happybeing On your view, I think you’d say this situation is manipulative and sinister, since you don’t want to engage B but are forced to do so anyway whenever you engage A. If we adopt your view in designing a social network, A activity should only show up in A groups, and B activity in B groups, and there should be no way of mixing the two. That way we’re always sure about which community we’re engaging and can stop other communities (especially the monied ones) from manipulating those social dynamics.
Again, I think your view is a reasonable reaction to a very real problem. But realizing it is practically impossible, because communities of interaction cannot be so easily disentangled.
On my view, A and B should be free to set up any relationships and reciprocal interactions they want. There’s nothing sinister about your interaction with B, which results naturally from your interest in A and A’s deal with B. The issue here isn’t whether B paid for access to A, but rather about your commitment to engaging A. If you really don’t want to engage with Bs then you may have to reconsider your relationship with A.
Now if we’re just worried about our relationships to group A and B this isn’t such a big deal. The problem is that money represents the capitalist community, which is really just a specific group. Let’s call that group MONEY. So it’s not just any group B paying to advertise in group A, it is MONEY advertising in A. Insofar as advertisements are all bought with money, then MONEY becomes a group party to all other groups, and thus MONEY becomes the dominant influence on all groups. Even if we accept that advertising isn’t itself a problem, the existence of any dominant influence on the community is cause for concern.
Our response to this problem is to shatter the MONEY group. Your “wealth” in Synereo is relative to the communities you are engaging, and this reputation can’t be simply converted into cash with an exchange rate. In other words, the reach of my content is a function of my reputation in the networks I’m broadcasting, and that will change from group to group in a way that I can’t just pay money to change. In our network, reputation must be earned directly from the communities that value your work.
This goes for advertisers as well. So in Synereo, advertisers can “pay” for access to certain communities. But the communities themselves decide how to value that access, and are themselves compensated for that access directly. In other words, the communities get to decide for themselves the kinds of advertising they are willing to tolerate as a community, and that will be different from community to community. We don’t see this arrangement as sinister, despite the very real problems with money and wealth.
The bottom line is that we’re developing a system flexible enough to accommodate a variety of self-directed economic arrangements, so that people can organize themselves however they see fit. Building in strict no-advertising policies from the beginning eliminates this flexibility, and so also reduces potential organizing power of the system. Our goal at Synereo is not to decide how the system should organize in advance, but rather to supply the tools that will allow the system to organize itself.
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I find your arguments simplistic when you say - as if I called for it - you can’t eliminate advertising. What I have said, is that I don’t like Synereo because it appears to facilitate paid promotion. Because this creates a destructive feedback loop. I may be wrong about that, I referred your colleague to the point in your document I’m concerned about.
You said we have different politics, but also acknowledge there is a problem - just that you believe it can’t be solved perfectly, This is no reason for not trying to mitigate, it is a reason to try and improve things. Whereas what you propose, to me, appears to simply exploit it under the guise of something else.
I don’t understand what you mean by different politics. What is the problem for you?
Rather than looking for solutions, you say it’s impossible:
But this is the challenge I’m claiming we can’t meet: how do you tell the genuine like from the paid-for like? For instance, say I’m given a free trial of some product which I subsequently like on social media. Was my trial offer a payment for that like? How can the network tell the difference?
But solving the “impossible” is how we roll here. Or rather how David Irvine rolls, I just cheer him on
Instead of saying it can’t be done, and presenting a rather baffling, to me, explanation of a very simple problem (A, B, collectives etc) - how to break the feedback loop - let’s look at ways to mitigate.
Paid likes, paid propaganda, are bad, I am still not sure you agree on that (so maybe there’s the “political” difference) so let’s make it harder to benefit from paid likes, and easy for them to be drowned out by genuine lines. It’s not impossible, it’s just a matter of wanting to do it.
If advertising worked like flowers, I’d be all for it. Flowers are regarded as beautiful by humans, because we sense their vital place in the web off life, how they play a part in keeping us all alive. But look around you. Corporatism is going off the rails. Money has been used to centralise control and advertising is a significant part of that. In the USA it is quite extreme even in the political field. That’s not just bad, it’s leading our culture towards a catastrophic failure. Let’s build new systems which decouple money from influence in every way we can. Not perfectly, just good enough.
I couldn’t make sense of your long, for me too complicated, example of A and B etc. I’m not a great intellect like David, so I need something simpler. But I did see within it some things that sounded good. Enabling choice, using reputation and genuine association seem to be in there or close by. But if you are using a currency, I’m assuming, maybe incorrectly, that there’s some convertibility there - or the potential for it. Certainly to “promote” content, that’s stated. Why else do you need a currency?
Isn’t it more empowering, more ethical, to let the consumer choose who gets more prominent exposure in their own feed? It’s only the other way around on facebook in order to facilitate their business model, including advertising. Twitter are now, inevitably, following the same path. Until the recently, who I see in my twitter feed has been entirely up to me, and that’s why twitter has been so useful. No one has been able to buy, or spam my attention. Notice how carefully twitter are trying to manage this process. Why? Because they know users don’t want it. It has to be done with as little openness and user awareness as possible, and the only reason they get away with it is based on the “cost” to users of leaving. A very powerful disincentive in a social network. So what’s the alternative?
I believe it is possible to replicate, at scale, the kind of social networks that worked for humanity when we knew everyone we ever needed to deal with. When great ideas spread without the need for advertising - they still do actually - that was one of the brilliant things about the internet before it was co-opted for commercial gain.
It is only the ability, through advertising and other deceitful misrepresentation, that bad ideas can survive. Eat X, it’s good for you… oh wait X causes heart disease, Smoke it’ll make you sexy etc. If you agree with this, if your politics really are different, and you don’t see the problem I’m talking about I hope you’ll watch The Century of The Self, parts 1 & 2, by Adam Curtis. Free online.
If you think it’s too hard to do anything about this, that’s a different issue, and I respect your admitting defeat, but for me the cost is too high. For me, it’s a pressing issue of survival - not just for myself - I have children, and I care about my fellow man to the last. We are amazing, and we’ll not survive that much longer in the scheme of things, but hey, let’s not be dumb enough to destroy our own civilisation this time.
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I’m not sure that is accurate. There is a qualitative difference between interactions between members of a community, based on communal values, and interactions based on money, what people call “arms-length” business transactions. One of the basic functions of money in fact, is to allow for economic transactions which are broader than the parties’ core communities/tribal groupings.
I frankly think that there is an easy solution to this. Dont have paid ads.
Except that this isn’t true. Allow people, REAL USERS, to talk about whatever they want, post whatever they want, share whatever they want but don’t permit large-scale advertisers to purchase large-scale ad opportunities and you will have raised the cost of promotion beyond the profit which ad-companies can derive from it.
The basic premise of selling data, is that the attention of an individual person browsing on the web seeing web ads, is worth a concrete but very very small amount of money. The level of interest and the likelihood of a sale is so low that it is not economical to pay any human being (or at least any human being produced by a computer literate socio-economic class) to have any interaction with these people at all. The way to make these kinds of ads economical is to compile a staggering amount of data about people, to feed the algorithms making decisions about what ads to show which people, which once compiled allows the holder of that data to do all sorts of other objectionable things. But even once you have compiled the shocking amounts of data on individual users, you STILL have to massively aggregate that data to make the bottom-line worthwhile for a profit driven corp.
If you simply don’t allow ads, then individual companies have to first capture a user’s attention, and then provide sufficient inducement to get them to post. Because the value of ads is in their ability to get a user’s attention, in the overwhelming majority of cases, this simply won’t be an economically worthwhile transaction. Unless a user has hundreds of friends who fit the “type” at which a particular Ad is targeted, and visit the User’s page often enough to make the ad campaign worth it.
So that way works, but the problem is that it means that the system as a whole pretty much can’t be monetized.
But if Synereo’s whole approach is a way to make it easier for User’s to advertise and be induced for advertising, I’m not sure what we’ve gained from the experience.
I don’t mean to bang on you. I’m just really not sure how Synero can monetize itself through ads without appealed to the current mass advertising market, and if it does that, what value Synero adds.
Does that make sense?
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I want to make it clear, that I’m very much in favor of solving this problem that we are talking about here. I’m just not clear what your solution is and why you think it will work as a social matter.
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I think we’re all mostly in agreement here. The very simple story is that I think advertising can be like flowers. In other words, I think there’s room for a “natural” system of strategic advertising that isn’t corrupting.
I gave Crossfit as an example of “natural” (non-paid) advertising: as @kirkion said, their business model works by inducing within their users a motivation to post. My long philosophical post was really just to say this this Crossfit model also looks like manipulative advertising, especially if you don’t want to see fitness ads. But since there was no “paid like” it would slip past any “no ads” filter we could construct.
My point is that this isn’t a problem. If advertisers find a way to naturally manipulate the attention field, that’s really not a bad thing if it genuinely reflects the interests of its users. The goal isn’t to eliminate this kind of advertising, the goal is to make the system able to tolerate and deal with it as they see fit. The goal, above all else, is to make the content and dynamics of the network reflect the interests of its users.
And sometimes users want to see ads. Star Wars trailers are ads. Coupons are ads. People develop all kinds of communities and values around these cultural artifacts, and they should be free to do that.
From this perspective, restricting ads as a blanket policy seems bizarre. You can imagine companies circumventing the rule by compensating users directly for “organically” sharing an ad, thereby circumventing the “paid for” restriction. In other words, enforcing such a rule would only redirect efforts into finding ways of breaking it. This is why we have to e very careful about the kinds of constraints we put on networks we want to self-organize.
I’m not saying we can’t do anything about it. Instead, I’m saying the way you do something about it is by giving control to users over the content and participants in their network. So in Synereo it would be possible for some communities to completely restrict any advertising from infiltrating the community (just as they could restrict any other kind of content or contribution). But other communities might allow a small selection of advertisements from selected businesses, and other communities still might be less discriminating on who has access to the network. Allowing this flexibility ensures that communities are free to self-organize on their own terms.
Again, advertising is part of how we organize a social division of labor. If we put restrictions on advertisements we’re also restricting organizing possibilities. And I think part of our goal in the network should be to keep these radically free and open.
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Sorry, all, I’m a philosopher by training and we tend to be long-winded and argue by analogy. So let me be clear: YES MONEY IS A PROBLEM.
This might make you all hate me, but I’m a burning man regular. The festival doesn’t allow any exchange of money (with the exception of ice and coffee), and people are encouraged to de-commodify by hiding logos and brand names (on their campers and RVs, for instance). This is my model of what a participatory economy looks like
On the other hand, the festival is one a massive spectacle of advertisement and subversive attention manipulation, with camps vying for the attention of the crowd on the basis of how much it can spend on fireballs and sound systems.
There is a lot of money in that network, and the money has an influence on the attention flow. The difference is that (apart from the turnkey camps) the network of money isn’t represented at the festival. You aren’t seeing corporate logos or brand names. Instead, you are just seeing human communities, coordinating a shared space and experience. Bm is not perfect, but it hints at a participatory economy where advertising is natural and organic and reflects the community itself.
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No hate here.
In still not clear about political differences, only different beliefs about what is possible or desirable, plus on certain definitions.
Manipulating attention to me is a different thing from ideas gaining traction on merit. We have great sensitivity to quality, and in everyday life can quickly discern what is and isn’t worth our attention. But advertising is designed to defeat this, and make it simply a function of budget.
Granted, we can’t eliminate these things, but we don’t have to facilitate them, and saying people will find another route is not a reason to do so.
So why are you facilitating advertising? The answer seems obvious, but you haven’t stated it, and it seems disingenuous to suggest that the reason is because advertising can’t be totally eliminated. You are I assume going to charge, and whatever you do with the revenue, take a cut for yourselves. This is not necessary in the SAFE Network, but of course you are free to do so. But if so, that is what sets us apart. You appear to believe in and are part of the consumption, money buys power, power creates profit, economy, and it’s destructive progress.
I like that you say communities can opt out of advertising - if that’s what you mean. I doubt it though because it’s not quite how you put it, and side-by-side I’ll have a bet with you which system people will graduate to if all other things are equal.
The whole methodology of advertising is propaganda. If we want reliable information, we don’t search google in order to browse the ads. But that’s Google’s business model, and a very profitable one too, so somehow that’s what they get us to do!
In fact, to get us to take notice of them, Google and others put enormous effort into making ads hard to avoid or filter out of our attention, and to bypass or critical facilities (see the Adam Curtis link above for this). Their system is deliberately designed to defeat our discriminating faculties. The same in product placement etc. It’s a corrupt and self destructive system, that you don’t have to support. SAFE Network, gives you that choice for the first time. If you don’t realise that, check it out. If you do, you aren’t going to survive here next to apps that do get it - else we’ve failed and we’ll all pay the price.
I shall support systems that do as much as they can to break this corrupt and destructive menace, and I’ll point out the harm done by those facilitating it.
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Can I just be a pedant and point out a certain hypocrisy:
The first quote is a statement of fact - not a metaphor…a simile at best, whereas:
…is a metaphor…….used to convince that advertising is bad for society
( chortle……)
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I did say I wasn’t a great intellect.
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@happybeing We’re still developing Synereo; if I’m vague about some things it is because things aren’t yet set in stone. The team is reading this conversation, and we’re actively talking about these broader political and economic issues in the course of our developing design. It’s an active process. Talking it out here is helping. Thanks =)
Our core technology allows for self-moderating communities without any centralized control or influence. So if some communities on the network operate ads-free (however they want to define that), they will certainly have the tools to do it, and we’d be in no position to stop them. We’ll never ask a community to see content they aren’t choosing to see for themselves. Again, Synereo’s goal first and foremost is to put the network back in the hands of its users.
But again I think this is a distinct question from the issue of advertising. I can imagine a network where communities seek out sponsorships in exchange for access to network streams for advertising, and where direct relationships between businesses and communities are healthy and mutually supporting, a flower-and-bees kind of advertising.
A strongly centralized social network like Facebook is designed to mediate this relationship: facebook manages the network and decides who sees what content mixed with what ads. For this work it takes all the profits and shoulders all the negative social feedback. This essentially disconnects the feedback between the social and economic spheres: we’re paying out, and they’re not paying in. This is the kind of advertisements that corrupt our social spaces; they essentially introduce a new actor into our communities, one who is only interested in hocking product and couldn’t care less about community support. You’re right to be critical of this kind of arrangement. It’s exactly what needs to change about the networks.
Synereo isn’t meant to be a middle-man charging tolls as communities engage each other, feeding like yet another parasite on a self-consuming, festering capitalist frenzy. The point, instead, is to provide a simple set of tools so that a community can organize, verify, and build on relationships they develop themselves, in a way that benefits everyone involved.
So I can imagine, for instance, a community of enthusiasts about some topic X (for instance, digital cameras), where some business B that making products related to X (Zeiss, say) directly sponsors the community in exchange for the display of some advertisements within that network of discussion. With Synereo, each community will have the tools for coming to a consensus about whether they want the support of B in exchange for the advertising space. They’ll be able to decide what privileges or demands B must meet for access to that space, and they can hold B directly accountable for failing to meet those demands. Synereo isn’t deciding the terms of this arrangement in advance and isn’t looking to profit off the exchange; the entire arrangement is determined by the community on its own terms. The arrangement might not be for money, but might be for other kinds of support (access to exclusive whatevers)-- leaving it to the business to demonstrate its own commitment and respect for the community directly. I can imagine all kinds of content creators seeing a model like this as a huge opportunity for finding and developing relationships with their audience, opportunities radically unlike anything the public has access to today.
Now, that kind of sponsorship is advertising, plain as day. But that doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me, and certainly not sinister or necessarily corrupting. In fact, it seems like a necessary condition for that community’s autonomy and self-determination. Of course, allowing communities to self-determine can be dangerous-- as Arendt says, “thinking itself is dangerous”-- but surely we must tolerate some dangers for the sake of democracy and freedom. A no-ads policy basically eliminates any such opportunities for the sake of a principle that ultimately cannot be clearly stated. Historically, acting blindly on such principles doesn’t tend to go well.
A no-ads policy means that communities in Synereo wouldn’t be able to seek out such support from the network, and this compromises the range of organizations that might develop. Communities would have to begin self-sufficient and self-supporting, or must rely entirely on the charity of the crowd, since they would have no means of acquiring support through the relationships they generate online. Perhaps that’s a theoretical possibility, but I don’t think the handicap is necessary to achieve the goal.
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If the thread is interested, I say more about the design perspective behind Synereo here:
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I do like this. It shows a convincing grasp of the problems that we face in this area. From this point of philosophical agreement I hope to see some more concrete explanations of how you hope to solve these problems.
Some questions you may wish to have answers to:
Who is going to put forward the resources for this social network? Will it be a centralized group? Either Synereo as a company or some other group or partnership?
Alternatively will this “social network” be a protocol for a web-page, or some other means of posting and exchanging data (e.g. a Safe application).
Will there be constant development or will this be a fire-and-forget project (no customer service, but no corporate liability either)?
If certain communities are more open to advertisement (and therefore generate more revenue), how will you balance these differing economies, to prevent freeloaders (this may go back to who puts forward the resources)?
I should warn you that the Safe Project has set the highest standards for approachability and transparency that I have ever seen. That means that the people here have pretty high disclosure expectations.
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