| Looks great - seems similar to letter.wiki I am skeptical as to the degree to which new platforms can help with the fundamental problems with the "sense-making apparatus" in our societies. Very few folks seem to be aware of the extent to which the news media, and by extension, their own assumptions about the world are broken or skewed. It is common for even intelligent folks to dish out quips like the "bullshit asymmetry principle", without accounting for the possibility that their own framing of the world around them may be akin to Plato's allegory of the cave. So even if we create new platforms, if some hypothetical person like Mr. Cucumber on the new platform makes a compelling, well-reasoned, well-researched case in favor of, for example, restricting immigration, the formula for discrediting this person is to cherry pick the profiles of some people who are sharing their content. If you find any references to some fringe topic like Q in a cherry picked sample of 100 people who shared the content, you can associate this person with those people and discredit the entire thing without having to attack their arguments. Those followers need not even exist, they can be made up. Before you know it the next trending topic will be "Who is Mr. Cucumber, the new darling of the alt-right?". That's the end of anyone ever listening to them again. This is just one example - there are many such strategies employed online contemporarily and they are very effective. Inoculating against this kind of bad faith tactic is necessary to see any kind of progress in many spheres. Our societies all around the world stagnated for decades, even centuries, under these tactics employed by the prevailing orthodoxies. The current state of the Internet has allowed a technologically leveraged version of these tactics to prevail today. |
I don't expect platforms like Pairagraph and Letter to change the world over night. But I really do believe that they could have a profound impact. As Carter and I have said in the past, our dream is to live in a society where it is commonplace for people who disagree to make genuine efforts to have conversations with one another. Our goal with Pairagraph is to create a place on the web that facilitates this.
If we get there, it will be inch by inch.