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While social media platforms chase profits by stoking rage, our algorithms currently reward division and fury. The result is that authority goes to those who shout the loudest, creating what I call a “shout-ocracy”. But what if we could redesign it to reward consensus and merit, much like Wikipedia does? In this post, I explore how we can use something called a "bridging algorithm" to rebuild the humanity of our digital democracy and foster genuinely productive online discuss

What makes open-source projects work? The ‘middleware’. It’s also why social media fails without it. The Illusion of Openness One astoundingly successful aspect of the early internet was the rise of peer production. Who knew that a global army of volunteers was waiting in the wings to write and give away an entire encyclopaedia, or build the software that powers the web itself? It seems miraculous. But surely, if anyone could write on Wikipedia, we would just end up with a bi

From digital revolution to anarchic thunderdome: why social media failed and why we need a new architecture for the internet Remember the euphoria surrounding social media fifteen years ago? Campaign strategists like Joe Trippi spoke of a revolution that would overthrow unresponsive political systems and remake politics beyond national borders. That was the dream. But as we all know, things went wrong. To understand why the dream curdled into a "hellscape" of tribalism and wh

Why do modern institutions, from government bureaucracies to architectural firms, seem increasingly incapable of doing really good work?

In our embrace of private competition as a goal, we mostly pass over a prior issue – which is the terms on which that competition takes place. This is undermining trust in a remarkably wide range of institutions in our economic and public life.