Chapter Seven: Order from Chaos
The average team member of PIST slept less than four hours a night for the entire month of the Cockital Building incident. Six of them became divorced and one forgot that he was addicted to cigarettes and accidentally quit. Gertrude Get ‘Er Done Hackenmiller held the record at 67 hours without sleep before she collapsed on her keyboard. Upon waking, she found Scott Gibbeck had unplugged her keyboard and placed a pillow under her head. Sandeep Hercules Patel, often referred to as the son of the god of IT testing, became so engrossed in creating test stories and regression scripts that he did not talk to his wife or children for three weeks. He was reported missing and shouted at the police that he was busy when they came to the PIST offices to perform a wellness check. At the end of the sprint, it was discovered that Bertrand the Moleman Muskowitz had eaten and slept at his desk in the basement, leaving only to empty several two liter bottles of diet soda he kept in his bottom drawer when they became completely filled with urine. He had not showered for the entire duration until his chest hair had grown through his simple white shirt and when he finally went home it had to be shaved off of his body.
What they built was a new form of peer-to-peer user moderation and a number of different implementation modes to be voted upon by the members of the Forum. It’s parameters are known to us all as well as the Bill of Rights or the 10 Commandments but they were as follows:
Digital Citizens can vote on and create their own moderation rules and rules cannot be made retroactive.
Digital Citizens can report content for violating these rules and content may only be reported once for each type of violation.
Content can only be removed if the content itself is illegal and offenders can only be banned for posting illegal content. Lengths of ban will vary with the offense and be applied consistently.
Otherwise, the punishment for violation of rules can range from hiding of the content, so that it can only be accessed by direct intent, to notation of the content to explain why the content is in violation, to removal of amplification of the content.
Offenders have a right of appeal.
A jury of Digital Citizens will be chosen to decide if the content violates the rules or if the content was reported in good faith.
Repeated abuse will begin to suppress sharing of content and content will have to be reviewed before returning to amplification.
Abuse of the reporting system, as defined by the rules voted on by the Digital Citizens, can be punished by the temporary removal of the right to report offending content or by the limitation of such rights.
The status of all such suppressed accounts must be made available to the Digital Citizen as well as the evidence used in the decision should they appeal.
Voting on the above can be made its own Forum topic and Digital Citizens may give their votes to a representative.
A frenzy of Forum activity followed the release of this feature. Threads appeared with every curse word and profanity and slur known to mankind in any language as “sincere recommendations” for a black-list, often from the Pen1s1@pper69 contingent. When these were adopted and the “shit-poster” -this was another term of the age of nihilism, when young people who could see nothing sacred in their institutions again attempted to delight in their destruction with mock sincerity- was made a representative of several million irony deaf Forum users none were more surprised than himself, as he slowly understood in his college dormitory that should the Forum be successful he would receive $337,623 for his work compiling curse words on the internet. The following day he skipped all of his classes and went to the library and read every book he could find on the rules of parliament and etiquette. He became a driving force for the Forum guidelines, most of which are unaltered to this day and later authored several popular books on gentlemanly conduct.
Basic rules were agreed upon. No cursing or profanity outside of discussions of cursing and profanity where the words themselves had to be used for clarity. Punishments for these rules were light, depending on the word used and any violation had to be explicit. No ad hominem attacks. Posters had to make a claim and respond to sincere points. No amount of votes could allow a poster to call for violence against another party. Juries should be chosen with a broad sampling of political affiliations. Preference should be to select Digital Citizens who had never viewed the offending comments. Offenders had the right to seek representation and the reporters had the right to choose representatives to speak on their behalf. A pool of judges would be created and their performances would also be tracked by yet another jury. For the sake of public understanding, discussion on certain topics had to be limited to an intelligible number of voters and any representatives not able to rise to that pre-agreed level could only vote on the discussed positions. Participation in the jury process would be awarded a certain percentage of representative funding.
In less than two weeks, there was no part of the Forum you could find in less than an hour that was not intelligent, sincere, and genuine. Concerns that the Forum would be consumed by the work needed for group moderation proved unfounded as bad actors soon singled themselves out by their own actions and were quietly suppressed. Their speech was there, it was interesting and attention-grabbing as had been preferred by the old incentive model, but it was not amplified. The notion of suppressing overzealous reporters as well as violators brought volumes to reasonable numbers. Some reporters proved to be so trusted that they did little else and imposed fairness over large polities. Given the public nature of these proceedings, attempts to declare these punishments “bullshit” met with screenshots of supporting evidence and memes indicating the violator had brought it upon themselves. In those cases where injustice was done, the appeals process provided a sense of vindication. As for the first time the people owned their own moderation process, and had a true transparent right of appeal, they began to see true shifts in acceptable public opinion back to cultural norms. A sense of good-faith returned to the Forum that had all but disappeared elsewhere. In a month, the Forum hosted perhaps the most intelligent discussion on the entire internet.
The moderation was what all so-called social media companies had aspired to enforce by fiat for a decade. Yet in their attempts at enforcement, with no explanation, no appeal, and no due process they had not understood why their users had become as resentful of their power as they had once been of the British Monarchy. Social-media companies thought of themselves first and foremost as companies, and therefore attempted to use a top-down structure on their “users.” The Forum thought of itself foremost as a society, where structures ran across and up as often as down, and so allowed its “Digital Citizens” the right of self-governance.
As one commenter said:
“It’s one thing to know some big Tech CEO hates you, or a twenty-something IT worker who thinks they are an expert on everything. It’s another thing to know that regular people hate you.”
In this cleaner space, the Buh-Bumblebees rose again to prominence. In the same way that a thimble of soap can calm the surface of an entire lake, the introduction of the Forum rules, and the prospect of a $167 million commission had transformed the cutesy presentation typically favored by Bethany Braxton Bingham into that of a serious adult. Under the pressure of responsibility she had morphed into something truly remarkable. As flowers potted in the wrong kind of soil may wilt and then flourish when given fertilizer, she grew magnificent under the light of the Forum. She solicited feedback from historians, architects, common citizens and a host of other experts. She hired artists to design new statues and new monuments to incorporate into her design and they all provided her with digital renderings. She became not only the primary architect but the leader of a vast team spanning the nation. Pen1s1@pper69 to appease his audience -his audience was disappointed after the introduction of the Forum rules to discover that his actual name was Jesse Herzog- reformed his previous behavior and made use of his influence by recommending statues and other features that were “totally metal” -for all of his previous crassness he was a sharp young man, and a talented architect, else he would not have attracted the audience that he had. All that had changed were the incentives around himself and his audience- all of which still exist to this day and inspire a sense of strength and adventure in us all.
Then, each night, in real-time, now using a more advanced Virtual Reality building program, Bethany Braxton Bingham streamed her design of the nation’s Capitol to a live audience of millions. Commenters elected by the Forum and chosen for the value of their input assisted in real-time.
It had been quietly agreed upon by pundits and philosophers of the previous age that it was not possible for a committee to create a masterpiece equal to that which could be made by a single mind. But the Forum was not quite a committee, even then. What the Forum was, at first, was a tool to create Coherent Extrapolated Volition. It was a machine to take the thoughts of a crowd and then to turn them into something like the focused thoughts of a single mind. It was designed to ask crowds of people “What do you want?” and return a sensible answer. Thus Bethany Braxton Bingham created the work both as herself, and as a polity of over a hundred million people, in the same way that the Queen is both an old woman and all of England. As she designed the new Capitol, she was both a twenty-three year old in a one bedroom apartment and also the Avatar of American Architecture. In fact, a popular magazine of the time would name her thus, and ever-after those who gained prominence on the Forum in a particular field would be known as Avatars.
What she had built had been inspired by what had come before, but improved in every dimension and most encouragingly, much of it was new and without direct precedent. In a world that could only make stark boxes or repeat structures from the past, the Forum produced new cultural artifacts in much the same way that a live tree will add new rings with the passing of each year, but a dead one cannot.
Reaction videos were posted from old men and teenage girls, with tears in their eyes, repeating the same sentiment: “I didn’t think we could make things like that anymore. I thought we had forgotten how to actually do things.”
Some sneered that none of it had been made real yet, but the mood of the nation was beginning to veer toward optimism. Exhausted by the failed paradigms of social media the culture of the nation began to shift. Without cultural shift, the Forum was nothing but a bit of code. The true output of the entire system was remarkable citizens. The Citizens of the United States were beginning to become Citizens of the United States Forum. As you know, it really was not done quite yet.