The Basic Things that Make Civilization Work are Good Actually

More on Trust Indexes, Content Moderation, and Stop Acting Like You Witnessed Hell on the Western Front and Can No Longer Feel Hope

Suppose something awful happens to you. You show up at a party and then everyone there suddenly turns and starts throwing eggs at you. No explanation given, just a bunch of eggs getting tossed at high velocity. You make a hasty retreat but you’re still covered in egg yolk by the time you get home. You’ll feel all kinds of things. Betrayal. Humiliation. A desire for revenge.

Revenge is strongest.

And, at some point, the seed thought of human civilization occurs to you: “There ought to be some kind of rule against throwing eggs at people.”

If you’re by yourself, speaking only to yourself, this rule usually has maximum tyranny and winds up being something like: “I should be able to murder anyone who has ever even thought about throwing an egg at me. Also if they even laughed about it.”

If you’re with a wider group of people and you’re all agreeing you will enforce this rule on one another people start tapping the breaks on their righteous indignation. The fires of rage cool into something more useful. You tend to get something more reasonable like “It is illegal to cause bodily harm to another person, penalties to include compensation for damaged property, compensation for injury, and a potential penalty of imprisonment of the aggressor if a group of people review the circumstance and agree it was bad enough. Probably throwing eggs at someone should be a community service kind of thing not a prison kind of thing.”

If you find out everyone at that party had some kind of new Mad Chicken Disease, that causes compulsory egg-throwing, you’d then make all kinds of sub-laws and caveats about how to treat with violence caused by mental illness. But the important part is trying to make sense of what happened in terms of principles, and then making rules to address those principles.

All law comes from people sitting around, trying to figure out how we can all interact with one another in accordance with those principles without everything going totally sideways. There’s some set of laws, mostly coinciding with what people want to do anyway, that is an advantage for everyone to live under and is mostly there only to curb the most extreme sorts of behavior.

If you accept this, almost everything else I say naturally follows.

ON THE INTERNET, DECISION ENGINES ARE LAW ENFORCEMENT

For those not in the know, a decision engine is a computerized system —we’ll call it that, it’s close enough— that takes a bunch of inputs like someone’s address, income, credit history etc and then spits out a decision about things like what kind of advertisements they should receive. Or in a game, how many hit points your gun produces and how many armor points the enemy has equipped and then it performs some calculation about the actual damage received. There are a lot of values, variables, etc and they all get sent over to the Decision Engine and you get back… well, you get back a decision.

I would argue that Decision Engines are the enforcers of Internet Law. The only problem is that we don’t think of them as enforcers of Internet Law.

I’m a listener of the Blocked and Reported Podcast. Somewhere in my Substack user profile this information is recorded and when Blocked and Reported produces a new podcast, some decision is executed somewhere to serve that podcast to me. That’s a very simple rule. The simplest possible law. I subscribe to a podcast. I therefore should receive the podcast when it is produced. So plain dumb simple it’s hardly even worth mentioning.

Except, it’s more full of possibility than we realize.

Everything you are shown is shown to you because of some decision executed somewhere. Everything. In fact, it can’t be shown to you without that kind of decision..

I received some feedback as I continue to push my agenda of allowing everyone, everywhere, to transparently push their agenda but be subject to review, feedback, and moderation of other groups. Y’know, republic style democracy. The idea that there shouldn’t be a single all-powerful enforcer of the order by which everyone else lives and people all have rights which should be respected. The feedback was that my system was a great idea but not for our species and not for our time.

Given that this idea is somehow relatively novel —take the stuff that we implicitly do in real life to make civilization manageable, the stuff we’ve always done for thousands of years, like the way you just naturally try not to be around people who are spouting crazy shit all the time, and just explicitly encode it into digital life— and I seem to be the only person I know of pushing in this direction. I thought I’d share some of the specific rule-types I think we should implement to order internet life.

I don’t expect the kinds of rules I want to live under to operate because people are choosing to be good. This is the primary criticism I receive. That I am proposing a solution that will only work if “everyone just does the right thing.” I want good to be the emergent level property of people following their own selfish instincts. The way that free markets constrain greed to produce goods and services, a Trust Index constrains pride to produce honesty. If you are in the right sort of game, the game forces you to change your behavior to the good. Never perfect, only better.

Only a few hundred people produce all the crime you see in the worst areas of New York or San Francisco. All that is required to bring about order is to find those specific people and either change their incentives or remove their ability to create harm.

LET THERE BE GROUPS

I’m going to limit the vision of everything here to a day 1 rollout. This is still several million dollars of development work, or at least it is in a large corporation. Still, there are specific features in here that I think substack could realistically implement without a huge budget spend.

Some folks objected that people like to form into Groups, to which I say: of course they do and why not? Let people form into Groups. People like Groups. They like little badges and titles. Give those to them.

A lot of the time the objections I get to this whole kinda thing are difficult to understand because I genuinely can’t get someone to believe they’re pushing on an open door. Yes, groups. Okay. Next?

If there’s something making you want to stand up and scream “BUT WE NEED TO DO THIS TOO!” Then, yeah, probably. Let’s talk about it. I make lots of jokes about being the King of America, but I don’t imagine I got this all perfectly 100% right, just that I’m pushing in the correct direction of community self-control.

Here’s the kinds of functions I want the group to perform.

Rules specific to Group Blocking:

1. When I block someone, I don’t just want the power to block them for me, I want the power to block them for my entire Group. By blocking that person, I’m not just saying they don’t have anything valuable to say to me, I’m also saying they don’t have anything valuable to say to my Group. This is the same as having a Group block list. Easy tech. To be clear, you should be able to block people for just yourself as well and to browse without the filter of the block list.

2. Provide just cause for the block within the block process. People should get to know why they were blocked and by whom, although at the group level it might be enough just to say “you were blocked by X group” if people don’t want the drama of a potential flame war. Anything is better than the system of secret accusation that exists presently.

3. Review the blocks of members. A minimum of three, but always an odd number, of the members of my group review the blocks made by individual members. I wrote something when I blocked the person explaining why I made the block. A few more people look at it, selected at random so I can’t make a little cabal that takes over my group, and decide whether or not they agree.

4. Make Rules about who gets to have blocking rights within the group. For instance, if I have tried to block three people and all three of those blocks were overturned then I lose the power to make blocks. Some people may just want to designate blockers for the group but I prefer rules that allow natural ability to appear. Also adding additional hierarchy stuff at the beginning would be expensive.

5. Make Rules about Block Appeals and Block Timing. The Group gets to say how long you can block someone for, a week, a month, six months, forever, etc. The Group also gets to say how they handle appeals of a block and when the appeal can be made. So you login one day if you were the blocked party and get to say something like “I’m sorry” or “I’m not sorry” and the group makes the decision from there.

Caveats: Any individual within the group can choose not to utilize the block list, but they will receive the filtering of the block list by default. If they choose to have their feed unfiltered by the block list, they can see the content would have been blocked, by whom, and their rationale within the flow itself.

Rules Specific to Context Noting:

This is basically Community Notes but for everything. I wrote a letter to Twitter after January 6th asking them to create something like Community Notes. I kind of doubt that was the inspiration but I’ve been on this for a while. People need other people to help them make sense of what is in front of them. It’s not enough to know some piece of information. In fact, having information without the context of community and trust is almost worse than not having information at all. You have to have information and also know that someone you specifically trust has viewed that information and what they think about it. If you, yourself, are the person that you trust most about everything, great. Good for you. Not everyone is that smart and they are relying on someone like you to help them get through.

1. The Group has the ability to add contextual notes to content. If I see something pretty compelling but I think my group would benefit from knowing that this compelling content is based on something I believe to be a lie, I have the power to add a note letting the people in my group know this. Conversely, I can also add a note to say “Holy shit. Checks out. This crazy thing is actually true.”

2. The Group adjudicates the membership’s notes. At least three members of the Group, but always an odd number, reviews my context note and determines if it represents the Group consensus view. I could write a whole other essay on this. Yes, truth is a sort of cosmic mysterious thing that is unknowable in its entirety. Truth gets reformed as we approach better understanding. For day to day purposes, truth is whatever makes sense to you and the people you talk to you in your group. It can change later, but in that moment that’s just how it works and has always worked.

3. Make rules about who gets to make notes. If you have three notes turned down for not representing the group view —my feeling is that there should be a “nice try, but no” option as well— then you just don’t get to make notes anymore.

4. Make rules about how long loss of noting power remains, etc. If I get three strikes and I’m out is that forever? When do the strikes have to occur in time? If I have a strike, a pass, and then two strikes and I done?

5. Provide rationale and appeals for the noting process similar to the block process.

Rules Specific to Content Amplification

1. If I see something that is really awesome, I want to be able to share that to my entire group. I have the ability to do so.

2. I want other members of my group to say whether they agree it is awesome or not, or else push it back. This can be more natural than a three strikes or three passes rule. You can use established stuff about likes, shares, etc.

3. If I am good at sharing content, I want my content to start out with higher visibility the next time I go to share content. More on that in the next section.

Let there Be Reputation

The obvious flaw in this system is that you need some group of people who are hardcore dorks to stand up and say “Yes! I would love to make moderation decisions all day!” In real life, the people who most want to do this are the last people you want to be doing this all day. People are willing to fight with other people on the internet for being wrong but they aren’t willing to do careful deliberative activity to come to a conclusion. The answer to this is reputation. You have to be able to use a little bit of adjudication to produce a lot of order and you need something in place to keep people mostly following the spirit of the adjudication. That’s what reputation is for. The math is fuzzy for all that follows here because there are many ways you can do this.

Rules for Blocking Reputation

1. Based on rules set by the group, if I block someone and I’ve got an impeccable track record of my block decisions being wise, I just get to block them for the group. Unless someone in my group directly wants to appeal it, my block decision gets to just stand. In this scenario, I’ve proven myself. My rules would be that if I make three decisions in a row where the block itself was deemed a good decision and the duration was also agreed to by everyone that I should just get to do this whenever I want. Conversely, if one of my blocks gets appealed and I lose then I lose my magical block power as well. Reputation should be hard to build and easy to lose. That’s the correct carrot and stick scenario that enforces good order.

Rules for Context Noting Reputation

1. Based on rules set by the group, if I have a good reputation for providing helpful context then I just get to set it without review. Someone else in my group can still appeal if it looks wrong but otherwise it stands. If two people both make context notes everyone in the group can see both and choose which one is better. Rank will be established within the group from this kind of sorting until eventually those with higher rank appear first. Similar to above, if I lose an appeal I lose this power and have to win it back. Reputation, hard to build, easy to lose. Let that be our mantra because I’m going to keep on saying it.

Rules for Content Amplification

1. This one naturally follows from the above based on existing algorithms. If I share something and it does well the next time i share it’s more visible, and the reverse where if I share things and no one likes them it’s harder to share the next time.

RULES ACROSS GROUPS, OH BOY, EMERGENT ORDER

Global Group Block Rules

1. There are global rules that apply to all Groups. If many members of my group have blocked many other members of another group, the groups become in effect blocked by one another. Say Group A has a thousand people and Group B has ten thousand people and Group B has blocked fifty members of Group A then all of Group A will be blocked by Group B. The entire community, eventually, would vote on what percentage of a group has to be blocked by other members before the entire group becomes blocked. Just based on nothing, I’d set this at five-percent but would likely need to be adjusted based on real-life.

2. Other Groups provide adjudication when groups are in dispute. So say the Furries are in a flame war with the Bolsheviks, because that’s the world we live in now. It’s become extremely acrimonious and it’s bleeding over into all other kinds of substacks and Notes. The Wood Workers, the Quilters, and Rationalists now have to step in and decide who is the aggrieved party or if, as is more likely, “Everyone just sucks here.” Someone from each group with high reputation has to make their case and evidence is reviewed. What is at stake here is each group’s visibility outside of itself, across the other groups. This is the thing that you put at stake to make each group want to behave in an orderly manner.

3. There are global group rules about how long these kinds of blocks last like “Hey, Furries and Bolsheviks cannot talk to each other by default for the next year. Let us never forget the terrors of this flame war.” Note, individual members of these groups can still choose not to use the lists. Everyone at any time can choose not to use these lists. It’s just that the default setting is that you’re not going to see the blocked content. So if you want to watch a Furry and a Bolshevik go at it, feel free, but if you want to follow the majority opinion that nobody needs to see this, you’re protected to do that instead. Should note, this is harder to implement, but sharing of this content also needs to go into the “don’t see it by default” setting as well. The reason this is important is because it changes the mindset of the people in the conflict. They’re not performing for a passive audience anymore. People who want to stir shit up having to deliberately position themselves as “a person who likes to stir shit up” and they can only find other people of similar disposition. I’m not saying these conversations are always so basic or that they’re ever important to have —I would probably always disable the filter lists— but they don’t need to be happening in the digital equivalent of your living room. You should have to deliberately choose to go find the flame wars.

Group Context Noting Rules

1. If my Group makes a popular context note, then other groups get to vote on my note and if it does well then all Groups get to see it. If Wood Workers, Quilters, and Rationalists all think my note is good it’s given global prominence. In fact, that’s a good sign everyone should be aware of that context so the underlying content is also amplified. Same on the flip side, if no one else finds it useful, only my group gets that note, plus whatever the useful note voted on by the consensus. There also need to be group to group reputation where things like “Yes, the Wood Workers and the Rationalists definitely trust one another to see what’s really going on” are meaningfully statements in terms of their content feeds. Again, basic rules like “if the note is useful to three or more groups, all groups see it unless they specifically don’t want to see it” would be in effect.

Group Content Amplification Rules

1. If my Group share something and it is popular across many Groups then it gets shared across all Groups unless my Group is blocked by another Group. Again, the rules here are more in the tradition of social media sharing than in the past.

Let there be Group Reputation

It’s important not only that I have a reputation but that my Group as a whole has a reputation. That is what creates the pressure for Groups to regulate their own behaviors at the Group level. It’s one thing if an ugly part of me says “Yes, JackMehoff6969, you let that Furry have it with both barrels! Let these cartoon-loving perverts forever know the might of the Bolsheviks!” it’s another if I have to look at someone in my Group going nuts on another poster and think, “Goddamnit, JackMehoff6969! You’re making the Bolsheviks look like mass murderers to everyone on the internet! My beautiful ideas will never spread now!”

1. Group Reputation Blocking Rules. I like to think there’s a Wood Worker somewhere in Minnesota named Dave Mitchumson who is quietly the most fair-minded, shrewd, and wise judge in all of the land and he’s just quietly talking about how to make tongue and groove joints on his substack. Let’s say the Wood Workers somehow acquire the highest reputation and he has the highest reputation in the wood workers. He also is given reputation for volunteering to adjudicate disputes. The Bolsheviks and the Furries come to him and he tells them they have to stay apart for six months after hearing both sides. He delivers this in such a way all Furries and all Bolsheviks say “You know what? Fair.” No need for a tribunal. Dave Mitchumson’s word is good enough. People can dispute it and then we’ll have to have some complicated numbers here where having low reputation makes it harder/impossible to challenge someone with high reputation and there’s more at stake. That sounds Orwellian and a lot will depend on detail, but you can’t have a system like this that is open to schizophrenics just disputing everything all day every day. In general, reputation should take a long while to build by making good decisions and should be very easy to lose by making one or a few poor decisions. If you are just constantly trying to remove everyone else form the internet, people should eventually get to stop listening to you try to do that. In addition, some Groups can have such low reputation that they basically just never get seen by anyone except themselves. This would include Nazis, by the way.

2. Group Reputation Context Noting Rules. If, in general, a certain group is always producing high quality notes then they should by default be displayed to all groups. This is the ultimate group power that everyone should be spending their time fighting for, where the answer to bad speech is more speech, and more specifically helpful speech. This is just a win for everyone.

3. Group Reputation Context Amplification Rules. Again, another ultimate power, if you are doing things other people find helpful that helps you and your group to gain status. This is good! And it gives people something to fight for that means something.

Other Stuff:

There’s little things here I suspect are important. When I have to judge something, do I see a username? Maybe I shouldn’t so that I’m not biased. When I am choosing not to use the block filters of my Group and deliberately engaging with people everyone is telling me not to engage with… should other people not in my Group know that Should they even see it? If I’m going out of my way to go see blocked content, should I feel kind of like an asshole for just gawking at a weird fight between Furries and Bolsheviks that everyone agreed had no value and was just human ugliness with no redeeming qualities?

How strongly should I be able to gate-keep my groups? Should we be able to apply some kind of internal loyalty or knowledge test? How should groups be initialized? How easy should it be to let someone be a non-contributing member of a group? How should the queues work for someone to review someone else’s work? How do I get my group to attract new members? How exactly do I compensate people for the work they are putting into this? Reputation at first but it would be good if substack charged for this so people can make actual money for doing the group work and at scale a lot of these things would be valuable.

How free should I be to group other people even if they don’t think they are part of a group? Should I be able to say “yes, you are all individuals, lovely. But from my perspective you share the common trait of showing up on my lawn and causing a huge ruckus every day so I’m grouping you all together so I don’t have to try to deal with you one-off.” I mean, yes, but also how do you prevent that from going sideways?

It goes on and on. Should groups be able to share blocklists to other groups? At some point the ease of decision making becomes a lazy form of tyranny. Putting your focus on higher goals become sticking your head in the sand. These are not easy questions but in the right forums we could try to do as good of a job as humans have ever done. But it’s all of us, together, presenting our best arguments as we have always done, that is the right path to a good decision.

Lastly, if content is flagged as illegal speech. In this case, specifically incitement of violence, my preference is that users from across Groups review the content and vote on whether or not it reaches the threshold to be banned. There, solved your Nazi problem and I didn’t even have to make someone the all-powerful king in order to do it.

ATTITUDES OF WORLD-WEARY HOPELESSNESS IN GENERAL

At some point, it became the height of sophistication to position oneself, emotionally, as a war-weary WWI soldier who just came back from the trenches after watching all of his best friends get blown up by artillery shells. You’ve seen it all. It’s all fake. All the way down. Nothing is as good as it seems. All power is corrupt and now that you have seen literally hell itself, what’s the point of anything, really?

Respectfully, shut the fuck up.

And I do mean this respectfully because I apparently care about you more than you care about yourself. Is this how you really want to live? And you want to pass this on to other people like some kind of gray virus so they don’t believe anything can be done either? Are those really the notes of the music that you want to move you? Is that really the warmth of the fire that lights your way? Be honest. No, it isn’t.

None of asked to be born. I didn’t ask for a bolt of lightning to strike the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July and for her to become pregnant with me. I didn’t ask for thirteen Bald Eagles, each holding the state flower of one of the original colonies in its beak, to fly in a circle over my first cradle to anoint me as the King of America. Do you think I wanted to be born hyper-competent and possessed of natural heroic virtue? But when a red, white, and blue buffalo named Amendment shows up on your tenth birthday and bids you to take your place in her saddle and lead the nation back to Freedom… oh, you don’t believe in any of that? Then maybe your other plan, the one that doesn’t involve people online being responsible for their own governance, where’s there’s just a magical CEO somewhere who will always be all-wise and and all-powerful is pretty fucking stupid.

Kevin, you know I’m right. Or Bill. Or whatever your name is. You can’t look on the idea of a Democracy and basic Civics and spit. Not honestly.

I got pretty down the other night because I found out this publication called Platformer has tens of thousands of readers and the author seems to have no earthly idea that he shouldn’t just be in charge of all decisions on who gets to speak and who doesn’t. His whole ethos was “if I can threaten someone, they should do exactly what I say, because I say it should be done.” That guy is making lots of money. I don’t charge and don’t have plans to ever charge because, once again, I’m pretty fucking heroic and that other guy sucks. I mean, Jesus, it’s not even close. Seriously, when a girl I went to high school with became quadriplegic I bought her a year book and got everyone to sign it because I’m a good person. That was like fifty bucks back when fifty bucks was worth three million dollars. I ask to speak to managers at restaurants so I can tell them the server did a really good job. I call up companies to leave compliments when someone at Petco or whatever goes above and beyond. In grade school, I used to walk a kid with Down Syndrome named Micah home from school and one time I stopped him from running into traffic at the risk of my own life. Do you think the Platformer guy has ever done that? If the Platformer guy was walking Micah home from school, Micah would be dead.

It took until the following morning to remember that it’s good there are people like this in the world because it helps heroism shine all the brighter. For every big city guy that says he’s a feminist and uses emotional manipulation to force his girlfriend into an emotionally abusive polyamorous relationship —I don’t know if the Platformer guy has ever done this, but it’s a general vibe I get. Also, whenever I’m in a big city my immediate feeling is “Oh! I get where internet feminism comes from now! These guys really do suck! No one should have to live like this!”— there’s a small-town guy like my dad pulling a dude through his driver’s side window and slamming him to the pavement in a Safeway parking lot because he saw that dude slap his wife in the face. It’s good that you feel down sometimes because when courage comes roaring back it lets you know that you are alive. Sometimes people would look into hell and they’d see demons. Sometimes people look into hell and they see Gondor.

Which of those people do you want to be?

Substack was founded by free speech dorks. I love that free speech dorkdom. These are people who are genuinely excited when Greg Lukianoff is on their platform. This is the best chance we have to swing for the fences and get something good, pure, and yes, American. The definition of a nation isn’t equal to “all the bad things that have ever happened there.” The sins of men aren’t uniquely the sins of the individual places that men live. We will never be perfect but we can be better. All of us can be better.

World-weariness is just an excuse for cowardice, but you can choose to be brave anytime. Let’s be honest. You’re pumped for it.

Let Freedom ring, baby.