The Big Idea

The owners of big media companies and their advertisers have too much influence over society. That's been true for a long time with mass media, but it's also the issue with big tech platform algorithms. It degrades our democracy, the economy and culture. We have a marketplace of ideas horribly biased by wealth.

We can fix this using new technology, enabled by the web. Decentralized media servers and applications, news feeds powered by a shared decentralized social media network and the direct and automatic funding of creators. Working together, this combination can empower the public to easily decide together what information, ideas and art deserves attention. What text, images, audio and video goes viral. Articles, books, music, TV shows, movies, podcasts etc. We can stop concentrated money from being used to decide what most people know about, how we think about the world and what we value.

Decentralized Media

The early web enabled anyone to post text and images to the web. Using whatever tools they had, and all of us using whatever browsers we wanted. Then came audio and video. But along the way to making this easier for everyone, creators ended up having to abide by service providers to reach their users.

The podcast experience proves it still doesn't need to be this way. That creators can still use whatever tools they want to publish and fans can use whatever players they want to manage and consume the work. We can do that for all media, allowing for independence for all. No middleman necessary. People are building these tools.

The Social News Feed

Decentralized social media is, more than anything, a collectively curated feed of news items. We manage it for ourselves, by deciding who we trust to decide what comes up next. But we're interconnected by who we follow and who they follow. Anything could get shared and then shared again, until it is seen by millions. Each of us deciding for the people that show their trust in us by following us, whether it is worth their time. Word of mouth, now at the speed of the internet.

Supporting Creators

When the media we consume can come from anywhere and there are no gatekeepers, the old ways of getting artists and journalists paid for their work must adapt. Infinite content means paywalls mostly just send us somewhere else. Ads interrupt the experience and bias creators. Funding must be direct and flexible, but also not annoy fans with constant asks or make them afraid of how much the giving will total up to.

A protocol for fiat transfers from bank to bank could enable a system where we all set aside what we can afford, and it's automatically divided up and directly distributed based on our time with their work. If we give enough together, the amount could encourage most creators to support the system. Costing us the same as today, but with all of it going to creators, a more efficient system for everyone.