You know like me in how reckless a time we live regarding how some Big Politics, Institutions & Businesses do not really care about us, truth, or mere livable life here under the stars. Corruption and degradation is seemingly affecting so many parts of our societies ! Is there any real hope for repairing this mess ?
All this can be distressing, but should not distract us from an essential fact : that good communication is primordial and constitutive of our social fabric. Now, since Mr. Elon Musk publicly announced his aim to transform Twitter into an all-in-one app à la WeChat, I surmise that he understands that. For a single tool (i.e. a platform, protocol or practice) could indeed suffice for us to be properly weaving at it again.
I have reflected upon this question for years, always with conviviality as a guide. And I have stumbled upon the general and very simple idea of an efficacious « Wish Machine », that is, one that can find, amid a large database of wishes, all the wishes that match each other ; it could be a good basis for a people&life-oriented economy, no ?
For, when needs are met, work&exchanges equitably recognized and meaningful dreams&wishes duly attended to on a livable planet (which implies a little foreseeing), what else do we need an economy for ? It seems to me that investing in that — and love, of course — is indeed all we need.
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But if the ongoing information war taught us something, it is that we also need an impartial collective knowledge-base where all sides of stories are told, where reviews are fair and new paths easily added — hopefully leading to meadows of concord.
In all matters, we need debates to be had in a somewhat timeless AND fluid manner, without any imposed echo-chamber to divide us. Moreover, in a complete ecosystem, newsfeeds should not only trickle, but also gather, mingle, battle, and find their proper balance in vaster and vaster knowledge pools.
I suggest that, in this all-in-one app, instead of the necessarily biased « unique entry » of regular encyclopedias, subject matters would first be seen as impartial dynamic tag clouds of proportionally represented points of view, clouds that we should be able to navigate freely and also articulate semantically, which good old language can do almost magically, and even more so with the help of some automation. By chopping and linking things into small units of information / points of view, Twitter has been doing almost just that already, albeit in a somewhat haphazard and more or less constructive way.
Some of our infos will be, on a complete communicational ecosystem, much more than fleeting tweets. Everything grand had started humble. We have tweeted ; very well. — Let’s have a real conversation, now — beyond the old echo-chambers, beyond distraction to no end, beyond the old « unique » program of manipulation ! And let’s live freely !
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Also, I believe that AIs and chatbots really can, if well conceived (to start with : without biases), help us in many of our endeavours — but also that humans should always be kept in the decisional loops that affect their lives. What AIs would be for, otherwise ? Who would they work for ? They should be our assistants, NOT our managers.
I think that a complete communicational ecosystem should also include tools that we can all use for measuring, accompanying and influencing upon the development and evolution of language itself, in an open, interlinked, and growing multiplicity of living dialects emerged from our very personal dictionaries.
Communication can be a lot more than sharing and commenting the news, or even sell, shop and pay for services and things : it can actually be a tool that will serve us to humanely constitute our very lives, dreams, endeavours and common world.
The idea is big ; the idea is worth trying.
— To the advent of a proper communicational era !, I say.
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For those interested, I developed and expanded those ideas in a book called La machine à souhaits — méli-mélo de clartés ingénieuses ou taquines — journal de bord d’un poète-ingénieur* (that you can order in physical form or read online in PDF format) ; there, and also in many articles published on :
LaTramice.net
Journal for the Coming of a Communicational Age
* I published this book from my own small publishing house, Les éditions de la Tramice, and, although you can read it integrally online, I think it deserves a broader dissemination ; so, if anyone is interested in translating it or helping me distribute it or publishing it in other languages, please contact me : Frédo@LaTramice.net (sans accent). Conversely, I would love to find an interesting book to translate from English to French ! Translation exchange, anyone ?