visions on the social internet -version2

[last update 27.2.06]

i have some ideas on the internet, inspired by "del.icio.us" and peer-to-peer networks.
if you consider the internet 10 years ago, there has been a lot of interesting development since then. But couldn´t it go much further?
If we would want to, it could go much further. here is my vision:

[click on "Read more" for the main text]

The idea

You certainly heard of names like Napster, Kazaa or Gnutella. These are peer-to-peer networks, where everything is focused on sharing files. In a peer-to-peer network there is no server and no client, but everyone is server and client at the same time, giving and taking, uploading and downloading. Peer-to-peer systems have some advantages, but till now it is mainly used illegally to download music and other media. But the principle of peer-to-peer itself isn´t any more illegal than a fridge.

Now, why not use this techology in a more productive manner and build a peer-to-peer network, in which a user can "issue statements" that others can join or reject, forming currents of statements. The more people join the current, the bigger it grows, the more power it gets.
(As for del.ico.us this would correspond to a link whose quality is indicated by the number of people who share it: "...and 217 other people".)

There could be all kinds of statements. Single words or sentences, bookmarks, photographs to movies, scientific articles, reviews of articles, webcams, online radios and - opinions.

Potentially very beneficial but also potentially very dangerous: opinions
There could be a current around simple statements like: "USA out of Iraq" or "no war for economic motives". Imagine Bush observing the current´s participation during the last year, he would have seen a real turbulence...
This could also have much consequences for democracy: What is important in democracy? Primarily the will and well-being of the people, right? Not interests of corporations. Maybe that´s why it is kept as indirect as 200years ago, even with all the possibilities of secured communication we have now.
If people could express themselves freely AND if people with the same ideas could associate in currents more dynamically, this could get a real powerful voice of the people to political parties, without the traditional biased media to delay or influence opinions. Isn´t it one big problem, bad communication with of the politics with the people?

But, unintentionally, it could also be an extreme form of surveillance by politicians and corporations. We could want that they do not know about us too precisely.
Knowing about our consumer habits is one big deal for you bosses isn´t it? This could be it for you... if it weren´t you are cowards, risking profit when people start boykotting you because they get informed about irresponsable behaviour like your sheming and exploitation of nature and cheap labour in development countries, unjustified rationalisations, the real meaning of biopatents, etc.

And it could be a medium for "bad" opinions too, like hatred against other people, racism and all kind of negative things.
It would maybe need some mechanisms of controlling. Or a more liberal approach, admitting negative statements and counterweight with the corresponding positive statements.

It would be good if the net could regulate itself, without intervention of "someone". So how could one counteract negative statements? By deliberate counter-statements, just like a demonstration of right wing people often brings up a counter-demonstration of left-wing people.
If you believe in the good, it should be possible, but if a real group supposed to counteract is underrepresentated or just is a minority, we have a bad situation. But this is, how it could work:
for example if there is an anti-arabic current getting more and more inflow, other people could confront it with currents like "the majority of arabs are not violent" or "don´t mix arab and islamist" or "USA foreign policy in the past is one cause of islamism" or "kind of retributive justice" or "we have arab influences all around" or simply "arab women have nice eyes" with a photograph of it.

There could also be a diversion of currents that originally have nothing to do with it, but were diverted to a particular current, confronting it or joining it.
For example there could be a trivial current "Chill!" or "peace" that adherents of that currents divert to confront "let´s make war on Iran".
Or positively, "Chill!" and "peace" could join each other forming kind of brother currents. You could literally form families with it, for example "peace" could be the mother current of an initiative against nuclear weapons....

There could also be some kind of communication between currents, for example if the anti-arab people are persuaded by the confronting currents i just invented, they could retreat from the anti-arab current which ideally would subside.

Also the diverting current itself would get characterized by a) the choice of currents it diverts to and b) by the participation of each diversion among its participants.
So "peace" could divert to "Marihuana", "Bob Marley" or "love" but also to "United Nations", "Amnesty International" or "Red Cross". This way different aspects of the word are covered, and you can see how much the participants of the current weigh them.

So a person could be defined by the participations or confrontations of currents, and the diversions, fusions or initiations of new currents.
Example: Let´s assume there are the currents "peace", "love", "nature", "solidarity", "help", "charity" and so on, that many people could potentially join. (just picked it as example). And let´s assume the majority isn´t really aware of the real meaning of it, the actual consequences this would bring.
For example don´t buy too cheap banana because this probably sustains child work and inhuman social labour standards, or don´t use fresh-cellulose paper, as most of us do, because it´s often cut trees of endangered habitats, which in turn has affects biodiversity and CO2-absorption, which in turn destabilizes ecosystems which in turn.... You get the idea of consequences.
Back to the people that too easily just join peace, love, nature, help and charity:
There could be recruitment of those too easy-people by people that happen to know about a specific consequence (not blaming anyone, because everyone has his fields of contribution).
One current "attac" or "Greenpeace" could inform people by confronting them in a non-hostile way with fact currents, meaning statements that claim to be truth and are confirmed by authorities like the UNO or that are "validated" by the mere amount of participants.

There could be ways to distinguish people who really aren´t interested at all in help, but just want to decorate themselves with their participation, but refuse to accept any consequences. Do you know which kind of people i mean? They just say it for the hell of it. Those kind of no-real-ones could be diverted to currents like "pretender" or "hypocrit" (or to say it precisely, the people disturbed by them, divert the "pretender" current to them, this way "assigning" it to them, qualifying them)

that´s about what i mean by saying total integration.

Now, what the use of all this, if it stays only a virtual thing?
First: even virtual can have real repercussions.
Let´s say someone issues a statement about a corporation´s criminal behaviour, for example a bank that invests in a pipeline project that the people on place don´t want for good reason and when they start to defend themselves the corp does some killing and intimidation (for details on this one google: WestLB OCP). And assume his friends join it, then like an avalanche people associated with those join and build a big current that forms another current "boykott" ... already this could be a way to control the almighty corporate world, because they fear informed consumers.

But it could get even more real:
if the current "WestLB OCP" issues another current "take court action" and if there was a way to contribute to a current with money, so someone could pay the lawyer...
With the money in the game and all the stuff you can do today on the internet, you could accomplish a lot, but as said before, you could also do really bad things, depending.

OK, now it gets really a bit visionary, but if you imagine a bit further, we are not that far away: If you crosslink currents tightly, if you increasingly connect lots of simple nodes, you form kind of a neural net with its own dynamics. We could kind of rebuild a brain, a brain that could one day include all humans and make them one mind of some sort.
Of course i don´t want it to get the evil StarTrek thing you may know, a collective dictature of the "Borg", but maybe we could understand our own brain a bit better in the process...

There are some possible software solutions:
http://www.p-grid.org
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/chord
http://freenetproject.org
http://www.gnutella2.com/index.php/Gnutella2

I received an email of someone working on P-Grid. He told me about a Project "Nepomuk - the semantic Desktop". i´ll see what they do...