Plexus

Plexus’ venture company is closing. A complex decision, which boils down to this: it wasn’t the right format for Plexus’ movement, toward an internet that values us as people rather than consumers. Your Voices are weird and amazing and made this movement start. As our company closes, the movement must continue outside of it. A more messy, human internet—which values the parts of each of us which we love the most, where we’re all contributing, where people connect through vulnerability and messy thinking rather than polished Tweets—awaits. Consider this your invitation to take up the mantle… to imagine the digital world you want.

"Maybe we’re afraid that once we acknowledge one stranger’s humanity, we’d have to acknowledge the humanity of all the others, too. That schizophrenic half-clothed man on the subway? Yeah, he’s someone’s son. He’s you, with hardly more than randomness standing between your two stations in life. The same is true for the cop dragging him down the platform by the collar, and the goth-punk-emo TikTok kid spray-painting ACAB on the wall a few steps behind while filming herself. Both you. Get off the subway downtown, and roll your eyes at the suit practically running back to the office, spitting strings of stock tickers and numbers into the phone like a Long Island wizard casting spells. He’s you, too. The red-faced protester blocking traffic on 6th Ave, yelling hashtaggable epithets at invisible powers-that-be, blocking that poor first-generation immigrant delivery driver from getting home to her kids. The same woman screaming poisonous words at her kids, and her kids turning that cruelty onto each other and their classmates. You, you, you." from...

workshopping plexus’ ballad app.suno.ai/song/11a7b445-…

one of my favorite things to do on youtube is to search for things like “London walk”, “Rio walk”, etc for different cities around the world. it’s so nice to just see ordinary people going about their lives all over the world

In some sense, I see all multiplayer collaboration systems as *simulations* Whenever there’s concurrent editing, the goal is to simulate the counterfactual “what would A have done if they’d seen B’s changes”

Thank you to our host @betaworks+ @nbaronia1 as well as @RazberryChai (basic.tech), @aadilpickle, jam.dev, @trykino & @plexusearth for their support + sponsoring these tracks! We have a few more sponsorship spots left - DM if interested! <3

"...this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order." (Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building)

architecture which embraces chaos... twitter.com/phokarlsson/st…

(While the above Tweet asks whether transparent and egalitarian surveillance is possible, it’s important to be clear: many if not most current forms of data surveillance are nowhere close, but rather, opaque and unacceptably target already marginalized groups.)

The biggest evil of www monopolies (facebook, google, openai, tiktok) isn’t surveillance. It’s that they don’t give you credit for what they surveil. Every time you explore the web, you contribute to it. You help rerank search results and feeds and teach chatGPT what’s helpful and what’s not. Internet businesses hinge on you. Friends and strangers alike have improved experiences due to the Google links you click and the ChatGPT messages you send. But they will never know it was you. Search bars, chat interfaces, and blackbox feeds make you feel like you’re receiving dramatically more than you’re offering. What would it look like if the internet honored the people that power it? What would it be like to see the www underworld? Not just feeds of advertisements, search results, influencers, and Tweets, but the web of mass-democratic exploration which glues it all together?

@Plinz imagine this... platforms ask you want you want, rather than presuming they can tell

In face to face interaction, negative reinforcement decreases unwanted behavior. On social media, it's the opposite. If you want to see less of a behavior, opinion, ideology, voice you don't like, you must ignore it. Negative engagement counts as engagement, so you see it more.

assuming all engagement is good is bad

gave a talk about an uncomfortable truth youtu.be/olBdZXni4HY?si…

Whatever you do on your phone on the subway, whatever podcast you listen to on your walk, whatever work you knock out at your desk… maybe that isn’t the entire world. Maybe, beyond the freneticism of what is digital and specialized, a deep patient world is waiting for you. Behind your screens, outside of cubicles, in the mind of that person whose shoulder brushed yours on the subway yesterday. The things you suppress when scrolling on screens, when working at desks, when making your headphones louder than the conversation around you… in the modern world, these become anxieties. In the deeper world, our unique thoughts and feelings are at the center. The deeper world is colorful and illegible and a shrine to the uncategorizable idiosyncrasy in each of us. It’s where people are happy. It’s good at hide and seek though, this deeper world. It hides when screens are out. Hides also when an inbox notification jumps up atcha and makes ya feel like there is something you absolutely-without-excuse-really-should-do. There are occasions though when it peeks out of hiding and locks eyes with you. When someone around you dies. Or is born. Or gets married. Big events are the classic hints. They shock us out of our freneticism, hopefully, and into a world of meaning. But when big events are rare, and small things ask for your attention at every turn, this world of meaning is hard to find.

Plexus is in the business of helping the universe wink at you. Of giving you a chorus of perfect stranger’s voices, speaking about the thing you're thinking about, all as a way to say: There is more to the world than you know.

The right stranger’s Voice can be a wink from the universe. A little pinch. Waking you from the dream that was your life, to tell you—hey, there is so soo much more. More than you were thinking about. And that the more is beautiful and inspiring and intriguing. And that the simple thing you need to do, to access the more, is open up.