I wanted to take a quick moment to thank all of you who have subscribed to my Substack and explain what I am hoping to accomplish. My appreciation to all of you who have subscribed after reading a crazy comment.
Imagine you had a pair of magical glasses. Just like in the movie “They Live” with Roddy Piper, these glasses don’t distort or add new elements to the world. Rather these glasses allow you to see *through* distortions by removing them from your view. The general sea of mind control that we all swim in every day, that we politely call things like “Spin,” “Opinion Pieces,” or “Advertisement” is filtered from your vision by these glasses. Specifically, these glasses let you see through distortions online.
Wearing your magical glasses, you pull up your favorite news website and, suddenly, there are almost no stories there. Most of the stories weren’t news at all, just noise. Your glasses have saved you from having to know about how an actor from your childhood may have been arrested for driving while intoxicated or about how another celebrity couple may be getting divorced. Those stories were not important so they have been filtered from your view. All that is left is what is important. The remaining stories are highlighted and noted, calling out which parts are fake, which parts are real, and which parts are missing context. You look at the name of a particular journalist, or anyone really, and a score of their honesty is right there in front of you. You can immediately see what subjects they know the most about and if the article you’re reading is one of the subjects. If the article you’re looking at is mostly fake, you can see an immediate link to a better, more accurate article. If you want, you can click another button and see citations for how all of the decisions were made. At no point are you ever asked to simply trust someone. If you, personally, happen to know a story is wrong you can even go in and make the correction yourself.
What I’m describing to you is a world in which the internet has been made Extelligent. It’s a world in which we can all understand one another and cooperate constructively. A world in which, if you want, you can click a button at any time and see through distortions, spin, and advertisements to view the same base reality as everyone else. It’s a world in which major media conglomerates cannot lie to you, politicians cannot repeatedly promise you things they cannot give to you, and where common people have actual power to make the world make sense again. It’s a world where we all understand each other. It’s a world where we take back the faculty of our long-term memory that has been siphoned away by clickbait, social media, and other malicious entities that thrive on the economics of your attention. All of this is done by simply adding a process of transparent democratic adjudication to the internet.
I’m not talking about hiring third party fact-checkers, where there are hidden and nebulous financial relationships that bias which facts get checked by whom in only a certain context and from a certain perspective. I’m talking about an open digital republic, based on Enlightenment principles, where we are all responsible for maintaining our society. Specifically, what I am describing to you now is something I call “The Index.”
You pay a monthly subscription fee, the same way you pay taxes, and when you use the Index you have the option to simply “read” from it or to “participate” in it. If you read from it you can do all that I described above and simply see the world unfiltered. If you participate in it, you will be randomly assigned to juries to adjudicate the accuracy of various stories based on challenges. Based on overall views and importance, also adjudicated by juries, the winner of the challenge has money set aside for their work. You can challenge news stories, tweets, literally anything. And all of those challenges will be adjudicated fairly by randomly assigned Digital Citizens who are compensated for their work. Some people make their entire living by participating in the Index. There are editorial functions where bounties can be assigned to certain stories, and based on long-established trust scores and expertise, these stories can be assigned to reputable journalists. Nothing important goes unreported in the world of the Index. If it’s important, the Index sets the incentives to make sure it won’t be ignored. Over time, the Index becomes the primary financial reward system of journalism and replaces advertisement with its myriad perverse incentives.
Although you are not required to trust anything from the Index, trust is the Index’s ultimate product. After you’ve seen it work enough times, and after you’ve done enough deep dives to see that real people are making good decisions wherever a good decision is needed, you stop feeling pressure to look into everything yourself. You are free to focus only on what you know. Like in real life, trust takes a long time to build and can be lost easily. Over time, some participants in the Index reveal themselves after multiple challenges and adjudications to have basically never lied. They are up-regulated and given the benefit of the doubt to rate certain articles as “important” vs “unimportant” or as “accurate” vs “inaccurate.” They can be challenged on any of those decisions because the system is open, and they have a lot to lose if they are wrong, but in the interim they are given the benefit of the doubt. Likewise, if you repeatedly lie as shown by those adjudications you will be continuously down-regulated. Your challenges will go to the end of the priority and eventually you will even be charged an increasingly large amount of money to make challenges. Similarly, if you were rated inaccurate in one instance and then vindicated in another your rating will sky rocket and you’ll gain the status of a Cassandra, someone who stood by the truth even as everyone else said they were wrong. The Index rewards this above all else. But because the Index rewards honesty and accuracy in everything, people generally don’t even lie to themselves. Your incentives are to build credibility in a way that any random person can plainly see, not to deceive people after years of honesty.
If you happen to not like the way the Index is being run, you get to vote. The Index isn’t owned by a private company, or at least not in the far future, after we have all used it and understood its value. The Index is a public good, managed by your elected representatives based on topic. If in the interim it has to start as a private company that company will only make money on the transaction fees. The bulk of what you pay into the system goes to paying the participants of the system. You can change your vote whenever you want, or if we realize that makes the whole system too unstable, after a set period of time that everyone agrees upon.
Also of importance, is the fact that the Index is not opt-in. If you release anything to the public, anywhere, it can be rated and adjudicated. You can choose to participate and will be rewarded for doing so, but just like with any of your other public activities you can’t opt-out of the conversation. This sets the game-theory of the Index to rapid expansion and adoption. You will be rewarded for participation whereas you will receive nothing for refusal. In fact, the Index will also help to remove some of the negative consequences of an incorrect article if you are able to explain why you made the mistakes you made. This sets us on a path where people do their honest best and admit their mistakes, because that is what the Index rewards and incentivizes.
No one, anywhere, knows everything and no one anywhere has full and total access to the “truth.” Arriving at the truth is a process, not a single destination. We arrive there by asking better and better questions. No magical person lives on a mountain top somewhere, nor should be expect such a person to exist. We should demand of ourselves that we grow into responsible, wise, and productive citizens who can maintain and care for their own society.
I’ve recently found my own pair of magical glasses by becoming a father. From that perspective, I can see that the future really matters. Human beings aren’t just going to magically stop. People will be around to feel the repercussions of the decisions in the present. In holding my son, I know that the present not a game or a joke or a simulation for idle amusement. There are consequences not only from our actions but from our refusal to act. We live in the real world and it is our responsibility to keep humanity alive and on course for a better future. With Extelligence I am aiming to do my best to share everything I’ve ever thought up as a solution to our problems. I want to grow my readership and spread my ideas so that they eventually become commonplace. I want to see the United States make a transformation to an Algorithmic Republic everyone enjoys. If you can see a hole in any of my reasoning, I would ask that you kindly point it out to me in a comment where we can discuss it publicly. Please join me in taking responsibility for the future.
First of all, congratulations on becoming a father.
Overall, I like this idea. If it ever were to play out, I see it as more of a private nonprofit BBB or Trustpilot system for journalists than anything... but that's not exactly a bad thing either. There are good journalists in many failing institutions, but the layman (me) has a hard time distinguishing them from the partisan hack.
Would it be a good thing if it were a public good? My real problem with this plan lies here...
"The Index is a public good, managed by your elected representatives based on topic."
I'm not sure I would entrust the government to manage the tool that would, in theory, be in charge of holding the government accountable.
Thanks for sharing a very much needed thought proposal to the table of discussion. You are being part of the great construction that is underway in counter to the destructive ideals of our current empire.