Two dollars a month.
That is what Facebook earns from the average user. Twitter earns less than fifty cents.
Every distortion of public reasoning we now live with sits downstream of a business model that, per person, is fighting over the price of a coffee. The algorithmic enragement. The endless scroll. The slow flattening of our capacity to think together.
For two dollars, we sold the membrane through which a culture talks to itself.
I had a long conversation with Jim Rutt this week. Jim has been building social platforms since 1982. He has watched four decades of attempts to make this work, and has been the architect of several of them. Especially the failed ones.
We were circling the question we keep returning to.
What would the InfoSphere of a civilization aligned with Life actually look like?
Not better Facebook. Not nicer Twitter.
The membrane. The connective tissue. The substrate of a culture that intends to be alive.
In 2013, Jim’s team forked Reddit and built LightNet, the early Game B home. It was elegant. It was thoughtful. It failed.
For a platform to work, it has to become a daily habit. A nexus is not a place you visit. A nexus is a place you return to. Email got there. Facebook at its peak. TikTok now.
LightNet got perhaps twenty people there, out of two hundred. Most things never tip.
Funding. Talent. Design. Motivated early adopters. None of it is enough.
So what would we build instead?
Not on Ethereum. The chains are slow, complex, and the only thing they really add is trustlessness. And if you need trustlessness inside your own platform, something has already gone wrong with your culture.
Not as a DAO. Most have failed because they are too rigid. Human cultures change continuously. Tribes around a fire negotiated and renegotiated for millennia. The DAO movement tried to legislate this away.
Not in legalese. Almost every online community Jim has watched fail has failed for the same reason: missing governance. What happens when someone is genuinely a bad actor?
Governance is not optional. Governance has to be designed first.
But not invented from scratch each time.
The hundred people who know everything about regenerative agriculture probably know nothing about governance at scale. They should not have to invent it. They should be able to fork the accords of a Nebraska cooperative restaurant that has worked for fifteen years, modify them, and run.
Forkability is the deep argument.
Biological evolution is slow because every generation has to recombine and mutate from zero. Culture lets us copy what works, with modification.
This is what GitHub did for code. We do not yet have it for living together.
If accords are written in plain language, a model can hold them. Monitor a community against them. Surface drift.
You said you wanted to do X. What is actually happening looks more like Y. Change what you said. Change what you are doing. Or negotiate.
A human could do this. No human will. A model can. Cheaply enough that small groups can afford one.
Not a bot. A living charter. A fair witness. Always there. Never tired. Never partisan.
The next move will horrify every German data protection lawyer reading.
Step away from the screen. Treat the screen as a fallback. Prioritize the campfire. The dinner table. The meeting room.
Then record. Continuously.
The hardware exists. The models exist. The bottleneck is no longer technical.
The bottleneck is trust. And therefore: business model.
I would not wear a recording pin in every context of my life if the back end were owned by anyone whose incentive is rent extraction. The infrastructure has to be a commons. Owned by the people who use it. Governed by them. Priced, if priced at all, at cost.
The Chris Anderson free trajectory of the early internet is precisely what got us to two dollars a month for the corruption of public discourse.
We cannot make that mistake twice.
And here is the part that is actually exciting: you do not need a hundred million users to make this valuable.
If the hundred smartest people each of us knows recorded their conversations into a shared commons, governed in good faith, the resulting artefact would be extraordinary.
Value first. Network later.
So why has nothing worked yet?
Bad location decisions. Internal conflict. Insufficient funding. The usual three.
The more honest answer is the one neither of us quite said out loud. None of these projects has ever had enough sustained power. Money. Time. Attention. Talent. Never enough to run the experiments that would actually let us learn.
A few dozen people on a piece of land for eighteen months is not a fair test of anything.
And under that, the deeper failure.
Aligned people who refuse to collaborate.
We agree, roughly, on where the summit is. Each of us is too convinced of our own particular path up to walk together.
This is the failure I find hardest to forgive. In myself. In the people around me.
Jim mentioned Asimov’s Foundation in passing. The small group that calculated the crash was coming and asked: how much can we preserve?
I can no longer dismiss this framing.
If the boom phase ends without us implementing what we already know works, the question becomes whether we can build artefacts durable enough to survive the bust and reach whoever comes next. Accords. Knowledge bases. Governance templates. Recorded wisdom.
So they do not have to start from zero.
That is a smaller, sadder, and possibly more achievable project than rebuilding civilization.
It is, increasingly, the one I think about most.
If you are working on any of this, I would very much like to hear from you. The recording into commons. The forkable accords.
Two dollars are not going to fix themselves.
And the membrane is not going to weave itself.
