the dystopian version we deserve - a "significant other" feed algorithm that maximizes lifestyle control (i.e. time spent hooked in) for private orderflow, allocated into private compute for better, behavior-altering algorithms.

the utopian version we should pursue - several things:

communication & sociology is a venerable phenomenon. even before agrarianism, but especially after, two elements started to emerge in daily life:

the social animal

there's a sort of routine, survival-based life that flows underneath conscious reality. the biggest goal is eating, for example.

the "geek"

once everyone's well-fed, and there's an abundance of energy & time, then there's playtime and more complex activities. this has fed back into the baselayer over many eras as technological invention.

there has been another layer that has both defined eras and served as the stereotypical substrate for human nature:

the "mid" - e.g. mass media, memecoins, politics, etc.

this is the pattern-finding of a social animal, stacked unevenly over a constant flow of resources, and when the resource management becomes high enough stakes, this ossifies into political estate, normative economy, and other exhaustions of capital. interestingly, the fork in the road is some aesthetic-cognitive quality, but as we can see, there a contradictory force between esteem and self-actualization. this is the paradox inherent in Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths, and it will never go away. it can only coexist with further hardened p2p determinism.

in simpler terms, decentralized social can be populated by 8-figure acquihires, but if the market progresses further, it will need tools that compartmentalize that deviation away from the feed w/o offramping/offloading the substance to a traditional economy. perhaps the feedback we need from the works of "geeks", like the network-layer developers at the blockchain, gossip-layer, & hypergraph, is the day-to-day "story" of a functioning, expressive member, not just of baselayer or "main feed" reality, but of some interface that actualizes this individual ahead into high-risk, high-reward, high-discovery space, connecting the value creation straight to the feed & beyond to other agents attending to the feed, most importantly being self-evidently sustainable (or recyclable) at all three layers.

there will always be a demand for "exchange floor trollbox" or "garbage" nodes on decentralized social, and we really should aspire to force multiply all user bandwidth as participant in as many transactions, responses, and votes as superhumanly possible. between these two, there is a question of how the users crowdsource the indexing & compensation, and there is a question of how these make sense in the "bell-curve wojak" school of thought. it's important to remember that many people are in crypto, and use ad-riddled free apps, because they perceive minimum opportunity/enjoyment relative to their current quality of life. the network can only really grow continuously if the current population has adequate choice between current clients, and some clients should lean further into a current "ad, scroll, spend, scroll" meta while others should keep or even escalate a stratified gating of their platform. ideally, we see more concrete, curricular abbreviations of mundane craftsmanship, juxtaposed with more "prospective + stream + retroactive" developership. there's an open question for the explosion of a gig economy along with a creator economy, that the two should overlap in the same interface. in this context, there is a dearth of geographic social dapps, imho.

the ulterior "geek" belief is hitting "flow state" or "renaissance" or "golden age", all of these rotating around an ephemeral, vague providence of many costly mistakes culminating in one way that just...works. personally, I believe decentralized social will make sense once futarchies are fully fluid (onfeed predictions are cheap, recursive, and procedurally generated), once privacy is a first-class feature, and meaningful work is logged meaningfully w/ maximal capital efficiency. we've come a long way, there's clearly thousands of global individuals interested in being present, but decentralized social is sort of hovering above a "1000 * Metcalfe's Law" breakthrough where a bunch of word-of-mouth from actualized, focused individuals further drives a controlled runaway effect. now, some may dread raising the subject of crypto at family gathering. decentralized social is something many should dread hearing about from lagging adopters at family gatherings.

This post is taking part in the t2 x Kiwi Writing Contest