[ants_everywhere]

> without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.

The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas.

But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread of information. Then there's the more Brave New World aligned approach of flooding all communication platforms with distracting nonsense and lies.

The second strategy scales a lot better. A lot of people are stuck in a mindset where you can shut down a few printing presses and kill an idea. That's the old war. The new war is much harder and we mostly haven't even begun to be honest with ourselves about it, let alone found any good answers for what to do about it.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

The new war makes it so you can post anything you want but the algorithm will make sure nobody ever sees it. They give you a megaphone but they also put you in digital Antarctica without a soul around.

I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then we are still at the whims of a search engine. We want our cake and to eat it too.

[ants_everywhere]

I agree. But to answer your question

> Why do we need platforms?

I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms.

The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.

[AnimalMuppet]

Real change - grassroots change - largely comes from a large number of small-scale interactions. Much of it is face-to-face. If you want to actually change things (rather than just broadcast a message to the world and expect things to change), you have to do the long, slow, patient work of talking to people.