Mission
Connect people in deep ways at scale.
Why
Current social media platforms encourage posturing and fakery, and through a “fame gap,” create a flow in which abusing the skew of the creator-audience power dynamic is the price of success. That may never go away. It seems to be a reflection of physics—”fame” is having a bunch of people oriented around you. There’s one of you and millions of them. No way to meaningfully engage. Or…is there?
Rethinking how people engage and connect, what they share, and how it comes together, could unlock deeper, more meaningful connection.
One of the classical elements of the human condition is realizing the common struggles that we face (need for love, acceptance, self-love, etc), and rising above them through a process of growth, self-discovery, and exploration. This could be hindered by social media, or it could be helped. I’m proposing that we find ways to gameify this process, to encourage it through the platform primitives we put in place.
We might sacrifice short-term platform stickiness, but for the greater good of humanity.
We could turn humans from passive consumers into active remixers. What if we remixed by default? What if consumption was an active process? What if, by engaging with social media, our veil was torn away, rather than being reinforced? What if you had to stream while you looked at content? What if people looking at the content were dropped in a room with you and you all talked and chatted about it in real time?
What if social media cost more to interrupt you, but also demanded heightened focus? What if it was like, “Hm…do I really want to pull out Instagram right now?”
What if our phones as platforms valued our focus, our engagement, our happiness, our satisfaction?
What if they could sense and respond to our mental states? Dopamine patterns? Etc???
Other actors
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Ideas
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