- Ad token / profile
- edge sources of meaning
- social situation for each
- a few bits of demographic and geographic info
- SoM
- Sociality situation for each
- Top HS
- Location / demo
Google and Apple are designing new tokens that share a bit of info about each of us as we browse or use or devices but they are optimised to sell us stuff. What if they were optimized to get us meaning instead?
slides
Improve wireframes for hard steps re Bret story- If I'm dealing with you and we have
separate goals
, let's say you want to start a community center and I want to teach improv. - One thing we could do in our conversation is keep talking because we know each other and maybe we find out that you like this first
Community Care
value and I like thiscreative riffing
value and we both agree that creative riffing is one of the ways that people come to care about each other. Suddenly, we realized that we have a common project. - But if our interactions are intermediated by a market or recommender, by market, let's say that only knows our goals. Then All it knows is that you want to teach improv classes. And I went over to community center. And our level of collaboration is is much lower. Because like maybe we're even competing for real estate. I want to rent the same spot for my community center as you want to rent for your improv classes or maybe we find a way to transact I maybe you rent the community center to do your improv classes. Whether we find a way to transact or we're just in this, we're just trying to outbid each other, we've missed a whole bunch of opportunity that are richer vocabulary would allow us to discover.
These limited vocabularies of markets create a great deal of economic loss agree to have on extra rivalry when without the layer intermeeting it intermediating it we we would find a way to work together or with a richer vocabulary, we would find a way to work together.
(Now, it's not that this never causes a conflict, it certainly does sometimes, for instance. I gave the example of these two types of creativity. If there's limited land, and you have people who prefer both types, one group needs a quiet space, one group needs a social space, well, then there will be a contest there. There's some kind of inherent rivalry to make these multiple spaces.)
We pushed towards thinking of our community centers or our improv classes as funnels for ramping transactions. In a way a goal has been created.
For instance, imagine I value creative riffing
, which we covered earlier, and you value this one—white swan days
—which is about running into people unexpectedly. But we are inarticulate about our sources of meaning, we can only talk about our goals.
So I say I want to start a comedy improv club, and you say you want to start a community space. We end up competing for the same real-estate, and maybe even competing for attention to get the same people to come to our different events and spaces.
If we’re lucky, we might find a transaction we can make together: maybe I rent your community space for an improv event.
That’s how goals work—either we are rivals competing for the same resource, or we find a way to transact.
- another source of additional rivalry which is when Margaret is cooking a personalized meal. She has a lot of customization options. She can react to differential availability of different ingredients. But once she is reduced her dimensionality become a pizza supplier she needs flour etc
- When you’re cooking a custom meal for friends, you can adapt the meal to seasonal availabilities, weather conditions, scarcities. To make pizza, you need flour, cheese, and tomatoes, and lots of each. You’re going to be in a battle with other pizza joints, not just for customers, but for these ingredients, for real estate, etc.
I want to start by profiling for people that you probably don't know
- This is Miho here's one thing life is about for her. Here's one of the social norms that she dropped here's one of her deepest curiosities and here's one of the spaces she made.
- This is Jason Benn Here's one. Here's what life is about. For him. One thing life is about for him a little tense is it here's one of the social norms that he dropped. Here's one of the spaces he's made. Here's one of his lifelong curiosities.
- Here's David x, y, z w. Know
I believe that these people, and dozens more like them hold the antidote to what ails us as a society.
I believe these people can fix what's wrong with democracy, what's wrong with science, science has been less and less productive over the last years they can fix our brain social fabric, they can make the internet less of an attention economy.
- The problem with togetherness has gotten so bad, that it’s breaking politics and social trust.
- The problem with meaning, I’ll show, is also breaking the engines of progress—like science and democracy—which are needed by everyone.
- In the developed world, these problems are breaking the basic cycles of love and dating, breaking schools, dissolving communities.
Now all of that will seem really hard to believe. But I'm going to try to argue for it and make you believe it. I'm going to try to lead you to believe that too. And the next hour.
So the solution is these four people, and more people like that now, I'm gonna proceed in a few chapters.
so I'll give this talk and in three parts.
- In the first part, I'm gonna focus on one thing about these people, which is they, they know what's meaningful to them. I'm gonna get really specific about this word meaning, and whether people can know what's meaningful to them.
- In the second chapter, I'm gonna focus on another thing that's great about these people, they're building a different kind of thing.
- Now, in these first few chapters, you're gonna think, No way, these people can fix such a big long term problem. I mean, maybe they can build some cool shit in their local area. They're not going to put these little changes in their, in what they know or what they're building. That's not the kind of thing that reverses a long term trend. And yeah, that's like the hardest part of my argument to make. And that's what I'll make, at the end. In a chapter called meaning at scale, try to break down these long term trends into all of the factors that drive them, and show the same tools that can help people know what's meaningful to them. And build different things can actually be used to change some of the largest systems. Systems like markets and social networks like tick tock redesign and tick tock. SketchUp better redesign capitalists. They're better at getting us what's meaningful to us. And these solutions will tie back to these four people again, surprisingly.
- and then the third part, I'll explain what I think that is shared language of meaning and this new kind of entrepreneurship can heal what ails us. And that this new way of building can even put meaning at the center of large scale structures. Like recommender systems, can even be used to reef factor to rebuild large scale structures like recommender systems and markets. To put meaning in the center for all of us
So that's our journey today. And let's start with chapter one. What's meaningful
Now, I think that these four people have what it takes to save us or they have what it takes to save us from what may seem like a desperate array of problems, breakdown of social trust, political polarization decline of progress in science etc, etc. But I want to say that these problems are actually all a single problem, which I will I'll try to point out in the next section there a problem of togetherness and meaning And then later.
I want to start by talking about a kind of hero's journey that I've seen people on kind of developmental path to becoming a new kind of person, a different kind of person and a different kind of entrepreneur This path has four stages
- First, questioning social norms.
- Second, discovering what life is about for you.
- Third naming your deepest, lifelong curiosities and
- fourth making spaces that are meaningful to other people. Making spaces where others can live in the way that their life is about enjoy what their life is about. And follow their deepest curiosities like the rest can't
Well, you’ll still have to justify your project to colleagues, funders, employees, and other customers besides Alfred.
That’s so different from if your project was based on tastes: imagine you were raising money or assembling a team to open a bubble-tea shop—you can point at an expanding market for bubble tea, talk to bubble tea-lovers about their preferences, etc.
Your funders will mostly understand funnel and tube successes, and will have a hard time seeing the potential of your space. They’ll want to fund funnels and tubes.
So it will be hard to scale your space.
We can do the same thing with a network of private groups. We could imagine a process where as information gets forwarded from group to group, it's successively refined. Users inside a telegram group could subscribe to either of two feeds information that's vetted by other participants in the group or both vetted and unvetted information forwarded messages could have a audit trail of groups and users that vetted the information they're in and the criteria they used. The same thing can be done with. Ai ideas about paid curators or information markets can also be modified can also be flipped around until legitimation processes, although I won't show that here for interest of time now the important thing about these modified processes that I've just presented is that they can be aligned with values when the previous versions will be much harder to align with values
Okay, and the last thing, would be proof that another economy is possible. Some kind of protected economy, where spacemakers make money, based on space metrics. A meaning marketplace.
- That could look like a building in every city, open only to space makers.
- Or an app that makes personal recommendations of spaces, like the App Store mock-up I showed.
- Or a social network that use space trains to surface the best spaces.
No matter what it looks like, it has to prove to suppliers that they there’s a market for meaning. And it has to show consumers that they won’t get redirected into funnels and tubes.
OSes
In fact, I hope we can form a cross-industry working group. Kind of like the W3C, which makes standards for web browsers. Call it the M3C. For drafting the protocols and APIs of a meaning-driven world.
- We can make open data about values cards, and use web standards to shape meaning-based recommenders and advertising.