Communities in the World of Bits
We live in the world of atoms where we have achieved the unbelievable. The present state of our world would seem nothing short of magical to those who came before us. The internet teleports us globally. We can fly like birds and dive to the depths of the ocean. We can peer inside bodies and extend our lifespans. The melodies of the entire world hum within our pockets. We are daily exploring virtual realms. Challenges remain, but our world is filled with wonders.
We achieved all of this by developing language as our magic wand. Language allows us to create powerful stories, which in turn foster cooperation at scale. Stories become social innovations when enough people believe in them. These stories — whether markets, money, religions, universal human rights, firms, states — provide us with trust. We trust governments with our property records, corporations with our brand experiences, and communities with our data and social graph.
These entities function as intermediaries, with the power to establish rules and resolve conflicts. They provide us with trust, but at the same time they limit our autonomy. To foster greater cooperation, it’s essential to have both. If we have trust but lack autonomy, it results in dictatorship; if we have autonomy but lack trust, it leads to anarchy.
We can clearly see this imbalance in the digital world, where big tech companies provided us with trust, but stole our autonomy. We live in a world of digital monarchy. We can't choose the algorithms that feed our content, we don't own our accounts, we can't vote on the rules that dictate search results, and our privacy is compromised. It limits the way we innovate, and the way we connect with one another.
When digital communities don’t have autonomy from a software provider, they lose their main asset, the social graph, diminishing their valuation and funding prospects due to heavy platform dependence. This financial shortfall restricts a community's ability to innovate.
Most online communities are subject to the rules created by US-owned software companies, simply because they are hosted there.
When one entity takes total control, it becomes Leviathan, an abusive power that suppresses freedoms and centralizes authority in the guise of maintaining order. This problem is especially vivid in the world of atoms because violence is used as a conflict resolution mechanism of last resort.
The world of bits is different
While in the physical world those who have physical power can get access to physical things, in the digital world, cryptography can be used in a way that no one can get access to information, even if they possess all of the computing power on the planet.
We see the digital world as a new medium upon which stories that support cooperation can be drawn, respecting individual autonomy and digital freedoms. Rather than relying on force, we can embed these principles into transparent open-source software, enabling anyone to verify how it works. No middleman is needed anymore.
This is the world where communities can flourish: incentives can be set to play positive-sum games and we can exchange ideas at the speed of light. It’s fluid, it's a movement, where new stories appear. The pace of innovation on stories within this world far surpasses the progress observed in the physical world, where lawmakers move at a snail's pace.
Technologies like blockchain enable community cooperation without intermediaries. Yet, there's a lack of user-friendly tools that non-tech savvy individuals can use. Developing these tools is complex, as it demands not only an excellent user experience but also technologies capable of secure high-speed communication at scale.
This is why we established ANY — a Swiss association, a non-profit organization on a mission to empower sustainable cooperation by building tools for freedom and trust. In its core it's a community of communities that aims to connect various stakeholders, such as software developers, infrastructure providers, community creators in order to build a sovereign social network that they collectively own and govern.
The products we've built are a direct result of our vision. They allow people to build and browse digital spaces — micro social networks. Such spaces can be built without writing code and can operate without a middleman.
This grants communities, like ours, complete autonomy from software providers and empowers them to build social networks where they can govern what they create and where the access to modern financial tools makes communities thrive. This way we can create a better, more inclusive, and innovative internet, thriving on the digital ground of autonomy and trust.
The world of bits is tangible reality which we are building together, line by line, idea by idea, community by community. It’s a movement.