So here's my idea . . .
Let’s create our own network, off Facebook and their data harvesting robots, apart from the machinations of Google and their secret algorithms, separate from the stealthy wallet creep of Apple, the wealthiest corporation in the world. The infrastructure is in our hands and on our desktop. It wouldn’t take much to link up; different people with different ideas but a common vision. The vision being to build something in place of what is falling down.
Most of the news and the Facebook posts and the Twitter twits are complaining about what’s falling down but they don’t offer a strategy for building something to replace it. Our political system, our planetary biosphere, our economic systems are all tilting and out of balance. They need to be rebuilt. Business as usual is not sustainable.
The competition for ‘our’ attention in the information age is fierce. ‘Our’ attention means it’s our attention, our choice of where we want to spend it but Google and Facebook manage to capture it, with their clever tricks, and sell it to the highest bidder as if it were a commodity.
This newsletter, the rohn report, is an example of an off-line media node, something disconnected from the big data harvesters. In my beautiful idea this could be part of a local network, not meaning local geographically but local as in a small group of participants, people who want to ‘spend’ their attention here, to browse or discuss topics, to create their own conversation thread. Maybe somebody is really into organic gardening and wants to share their knowledge and experience, they could be a node. I would sign up for that. Maybe somebody’s into shortwave radio and they want to share their stories, that could be a node. Maybe somebody’s interested in solar energy and wants to help people hook up solar panels to their house; total node. Set up your blog, your website, your Substack account and plug in to a local network.
Something like digital gardening where things grow organically and without the toxic chemicals of data tracking and data trading.
“Facebook provides a network where the users, while getting free services most of them consider useful, are subject to a multitude of nontransparent analyses, profiling, and other mostly obscure algorithmical processing,” says Johannes Caspar, the data protection commissioner for Hamburg, Germany, in a story from the NY Times.
We can do better than this.