The Digital Town Square Needs a Library
We are excited to explore how Elon Musk’s Twitter could not only host conversations but also build knowledge about matters vital to humanity. We start with the notion of Twitter as the world’s digital town square, the implications, and how to unlock undiscovered value that could both improve Twitter’s bottom line and increase humanity’s capacity to address global challenges. This first article addresses what’s missing — a digital town library. It also introduces two potential structures for the combination of the digital town square and library: collective knowledge systems and boundary infrastructures.
In an October 2022 talk show about why people are trying to cancel Elon Musk, host Tucker Carlson posed a thought experiment.
Suppose you wanted to turn a free country into a dictatorship. What would you do? What freedom would you curtail first?
The U.S. founding fathers thought deeply about this question. They wanted to prevent dictatorship in their new country. They concluded that the freedom of speech was the most basic and essential of all freedoms. Hence, they enshrined it as the very first amendment to the Bill of Rights.
Carlson contends that free speech is central not only to freedom but to humanity if we want a democratic future:
It’s not opposable thumbs that separate us from the animals. It’s words. We can speak. That’s our power: words. In the beginning was the Word declares John at the opening of the fourth gospel, the Word. The Word is the most important thing. Take away our ability to choose our own words and we are no longer fully human. We are subjects. We are chattel. Authoritarians understand this above all. That’s why they hate freedom of speech… With words, you can expose them. With words, you can change the world. In fact, there has never been… a deep change to the way people live and think that didn’t begin with words. That’s why they’re so obsessively focused on what you can say, on the words you can use. Because they understand the power of words.
Speech enables us to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate. Allowing entities to arbitrate speech compromises our capacity to work together for a common purpose. Arbitrating entities cannot help themselves from controlling the narrative, thereby limiting the potential outcomes of conversations. Hence, if we need to accomplish something as a collective — like dealing with global challenges — freedom of speech must be on the critical path.
The Digital Town Square
Twitter’s April 25 buyout announcement quoted Musk:
Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.
On October 27th, the eve of the deal’s completion, Musk doubled down in a tweet to Twitter advertisers, saying civilization needs a common digital town square, where people can debate a wide range of issues without violence. He continues:
There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society. In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of traditional media has fueled and catered to those polarized extremes, as they believe that is what brings in the money, but in doing so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost.
Characterizing Twitter as a “digital town square” makes sense. Twitter users debate everything, including “matters vital to the future of humanity.” Statistica contends Twitter is more like a digital debate club because its user base is much smaller than Facebook and Instagram. And, only 30% of social media users in the U.S. regularly use Twitter and even fewer in major European markets such as France and Germany.
We disagree. While we wonder how many Twitter users are actually bots, we also have a strong sense that real people debate real ideas on Twitter. We also recognize that most of a town may not have shown up, much less spoken in the traditional town square. Apparently, the largest crowds would show up for hangings and beheadings. The packed square could only hold a fraction of the town population. In debates, most people were watchers rather than speakers. Still, the effects of town square debates rippled into the collective consciousness and town life.
While Twitter isn’t a functional digital town square everywhere, it’s influential for the English-speaking world, which has shaped global socio-economics in the last century. Twitter is where serious online conversations are happening in the world’s largest economy in the de facto world language.
Thus, we think Twitter as the digital town square is a fair characterization, an important aspiration, and a fantastic opportunity.
But here’s the rub. A digital town square is not enough. In fact, as another silo, it often degenerates into people arguing for their confirmation bias. In ephemeral arguments, facts take a backseat to emotions, unsupported opinions, and logical fallacies. People choose sides, and battles begin. People get canceled, shadow banned, and de-platformed. Worst, people polarize into fixed mindsets. Gridlock continues. Collective intelligence remains a fleeting thought.
Such is today’s Twitter. Musk plans to make Twitter a better town square. Authenticating humans, eliminating spam bots, opening algorithms, and making advertising contextually relevant are important steps. But they’re not enough.
A digital town square may be essential to humanity’s future, but it’s not sufficient. Twitter enables one to connect with like-minded people, garner attention, spout poorly substantiated opinions, and troll those with contrary beliefs. Not much changing of minds is happening. This may still be the case after Musk has implemented his plans. Musk’s town square could illuminate what people think and algorithms do. It could surface suppressed voices and narratives. But it won’t build knowledge and may not lead to better outcomes.
Operating by itself, the digital town square is a firehose of disparate voices with no sense of a collective or continuing conversation. Rather it’s a continual stream of unstructured information, impossible for humans to make sense of without computers. And the insight generated is ephemeral. Most of the insight that ripples beyond the square is untraceable, occurring in people’s minds, and resurfacing in conversations and tweets, often without reference to origin or substantiation. Hence, it’s difficult to measure Twitter’s impact on the humanity’s wellbeing or intelligence.
A functional town square is not a silo. It operates in a context, as part of a greater system; the town. The digital town square should also operate as part of a greater system; the metaphorical digital town that is the online world. One of the most important aspects of any town is its library.
The Digital Town Library
The library’s purpose has always been to collect knowledge, learn from it, and use it to improve life. Throughout history, libraries have disseminated important advances in agriculture, architecture, medicine, art, manufacturing, war, and more via vast collections of books and printed materials.
With over 17,000 libraries and 2.5 billion materials circulating annually, libraries are an important part of the U.S. landscape. As libraries modernize, however, they face a harsh budget environment, and technological disruption in media, scholarship, and education. Declines in usage of traditional library services at universities over the past 25 years suggest students are looking elsewhere for information. While the public still values access to printed books, today’s libraries offer a wide range of digital, educational, social and entrepreneurial tools, which is attracting significant public investment. Libraries have also been at the forefront of organizing public makerspaces and workspaces to promote collaboration and entrepreneurship.
We think the digital town square needs a digital town library to realize its value to humanity. A digital town library provides a shared contextual view so humanity can have an informed conversation, increasing the likelihood of outcomes that address the needs and circumstances of people and the planet. The main activity of the library is the assembly, arrangement, and connecting of information into knowledge.
We see the possibility of a virtuous cycle. Where the town square generates conversation, the library archives, analyzes, and turns it into knowledge and information that influences decision making and cycles back into the town square. Town decisions and conversations become grounded in reality, yet continue to reflect human values and concerns.
The digital town library connects online information into an information ecology that provides a shared context for communication, sensemaking, and coordination. The information ecology grows as conversations continue in the digital town square and the library assembles it into knowledge. Robust information ecologies connect information across the webpage silos endemic to Today’s Web, creating possibilities for breakthroughs, collective cognition, and new perceptions, choices, and outcomes.
A Collective Knowledge System
Together, the digital town square and library comprise a collective knowledge system, a term coined by Tom Gruber in Collective Knowledge Systems: Where the Social Web meets the Semantic Web. Collective knowledge systems are human-computer systems that collect and harvest large amounts of human-generated knowledge.
Collective knowledge systems have social and semantic aspects. Twitter is a social web with 238 million daily active users tweeting their opinions, thereby creating searchable and sharable information. Gruber calls this “collected intelligence.” The digital library is a semantic web, which classifies and connects social content and uses computational technology, including machine learning and text mining techniques, to find structures and patterns.
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee said:
The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
According to Gruber, the challenge for next-generation knowledge systems is to match what’s put online (e.g., tweets) with methods for doing useful reasoning with the data. True collective intelligence can emerge if the data collected can aggregate and recombine into new knowledge and ways of learning that individuals can’t do by themselves.
The traditional Semantic Web approach would be to embed semantic tags into the webpage code. But the least friction implementation is to add semantics in a “library layer” above the webpage. We call the space above the webpage the Metaweb. This implementation abstracts the semantic content. It also extends Twitter’s reach to every relevant webpage. This meta-layer could connect tweet content to the relevant content anywhere online, providing context and building an information ecology that generates value.
In the Metaweb, “information ecologists” would earn compensation for cultivating the information ecology and creating value. They would gather information to “feed” the information ecology by creating new entries, verifying submissions, and updating existing information. They could work alone or in small teams, delving into tweet archives and external sources to find substantiating information about important tweets, through scientific publications, news sites, relevant experts, research institutes, and so on.
Thus, the collective knowledge system would not only create new value streams for Twitter but also new categories of meaningful remote work and a shared contextual view of matters vital to humanity’s future.
The Boundary Infrastructure
This marriage of the digital town square and digital town library also creates boundary infrastructure, the holy grail of knowledge production. Boundary infrastructures create an ecosystem where groups use and generate different knowledge as part of their particular mission-driven interactions with the system. But boundary infrastructures are rare. Most existing infrastructures that build knowledge focus on a specific information object (e.g., tweets are 280 characters or fewer) with limited use cases and often within a specific firm or group.
A study from two Parisian universities about rare disease research defined the term “boundary infrastructure.” Boundary infrastructures produce knowledge as one output of their work and articulate it with other kinds of activities and matters of concern. Boundary infrastructures serve multiple communities of practice, within a single organization or distributed across multiple organizations. The benefit of the boundary infrastructure concept over traditional unitary vision infrastructures is support for differing information objects within diverse communities of practice that share the infrastructure.
According to Bowker et al. 1994:
To negotiate the political, moral and epistemic dimensions of the boundary infrastructure they contribute to and rely on, actors resort to infrastructural inversion: they discuss explicitly the infrastructure itself, and strive to represent its inner workings, shortcomings and desirable evolutions. Infrastructural inversion, therefore, is not only a methodological lens for the analyst to capture how things like databases and classification systems are embedded in the many practices of collectives… It is also constitutive of the practices of these collectives themselves.
Thus, participants in boundary infrastructures are in an ongoing process of reflection on the system and its processes. This reminds us of Doug Engelbart’s Bootstrap Principle, where a human-machine system simultaneously harvests collected knowledge and evolves the technology for collective learning. In these systems, both humans and machines actively build knowledge, each doing what they do best.
With Twitter, different actors could come together in a boundary infrastructure for matters vital to humanity. Creators, including video shows, journalists, authors, and graphic artists, would create meaningful tweets. Companies, NGOs, and influencers would reply and retweet the content. Content consumers, including researchers, read and interact with the content. Information ecologists would connect and classify content and conversations, verify and fix submissions, and monitor the system. AI would suggest classifications and connections, look for patterns, and filter content. This ecosystem of actors could build knowledge from social interactions that are already occurring with minimal coordination.
In sum, Twitter as a digital town square needs a digital town library. The union of the town square and library could create a boundary infrastructure for matters vital to humanity’s future. This boundary infrastructure would in fact be a collective knowledge system where Twitter provides the social content and information ecologists build semantic content in a meta-layer above the webpage. The collective knowledge system would build collective intelligence that enables humanity to better address its global challenges.
That’s what the world needs now!
We think the digital town library could more than 10x the value of the digital town square. Think of a robust topical information ecology and its potential value streams. Imagine how much Google would pay to integrate a Tweet content graph into their search results. Consider how you would value instantaneous access to contextually relevant information for whatever you are focusing on. Imagine the intangible value of meeting and interacting with tweeps on the same tweet. And more.
Stay tuned for more content on the Digital Town Library
****************************************************************************
About Bridgit DAO
Bridgit DAO catalyzes, supports, and launches social DAOs focusing on regeneration, cognitive freedom, and collective intelligence. Bridgit DAO is pioneering the development of the space above the webpage, the Metaweb. It is a leading partner in the Presence browser overlay. Bridgit DAO is authoring the book, “The Metaweb: The Next Level of the Web“ and launching the Metaweb book Pre-launch NFT and the Metaweb NFT collections. It is based in Tulum, México.
The Presence Browser
Presence DAO formed to build the Presence broweser overlay, which is essential infrastructure for the hyper-dimensional next-level of the Web.
The Presence browser overlay provides access to the Overweb — the first full instantiation of the Metaweb. The Overweb is a safe digital space where real people, information, and interactions have a presence over webpages. The overlay is accessible through browser extensions, an SDK, and a forthcoming mobile app. Overlay applications and ultimately browsers will adopt the protocol. Thus, entire communities connect across devices and applications. The benefit to society is ultimately a more connected citizenry that is equipped to take part in all levels of democracy.
The intention is to develop an ecosystem that motivates individuals, teams, and communities to connect and interact around their shared areas of interest. We do this with community incentives that reward activities that build the ecosystem.
The Presence overlay tech won the Disruptive Technology Culture Driver award from the EU’s flagship NGI program. This award is for actively building a new culture around technology that breaks up knowledge silos, creates contextual intelligence, connects disciplines, and targets a diverse audience. The initiator of the Overweb, Bridgit DAO, was the only non-European company to win a Next Generation Internet award from the EU’s flagship program.
Access to the Overweb through the Presence browser overlay enables people who want a richer web experience to interact, collaborate, and learn together on the same web page with no coordination — even if they don’t know each other or speak the same language — via a browser overlay tool that navigates an interactive self-generating, collective learning map referred to as the Universal Content Graph.
For more information, visit the Presence website.
The Metaweb Book
Bridgit DAO is authoring a book called “The Metaweb: The Next Level of the Internet”. The book is about a new layer on top of the web that creates decentralized public space above the web page, which will drastically reduce the problems with false information, abusers, and scammers, and enable an unprecedented level of connection and coordination that is necessary to deal with our existential threats. Our publisher is the renowned Taylor & Francis. This will be both a physical book and an NFT book (Taylor & Francis’ first NFT book).
To learn more about the book and NFTs, please visit https://bridgit.io/metaweb-book and sign up for our list to be notified of NFT and book drops.
The Metaweb NFT collection
The Metaweb NFT collection will be unique NFTs featuring AI-generated and human designs. AI-generated backgrounds and some of the variations will be rarities. Holders will enjoy many perks as early Metaweb adopters. Below are examples from the collection.
