In Support of the Pro-Human AI Coalition -- Some Suggested Framings

I was very pleased to see the launch of the Pro-Human AI Coalition this week, because I have been informally workshopping proposals for such a coalition for the fusion of AI with SM, based on strong overlap of issues and growing urgency to course-correct. (That included discussions with Jeb Bell of Project Liberty in November of last year and March of this year.)

Since February I have been workshopping a working outline discussion draft for a long form piece (still very rough), and more recently turned my attention to drafting a short-form piece that I hope might run in Tech Policy Press soon.

What follows is an lightly edited extract of key sections from my working draft of that shorter-form piece. I gather that the Pro-Human AI Coalition effort is highly aligned with the framings I propose, and look forward to dialog on how this kind of simple framings can help unify efforts that have so far been fragmented, and hard for non-specialists to understand without getting lost in overwhelming detail.

[Update 9/22:] Also, I hope this will really be a Pro-Human AI/SM Coalition -- reflecting the shared issues of "societal risk," as AI fuses with social media (SM), that are already having serious impact. What are now two cultures – of AI and SM – must work together on the combined problem of AI/SM – as AI is used in SM, and as AI takes on the role of SM and is increasingly based on social media content. So far, the hyperscaling of AI has seemed largely oblivious to the fact that humans evolved and flourished as social creatures – and to the related lessons of SM's failure to serve real human connection.

Key sections from my preliminary draft:

As the fusion of Artificial Intelligence with Social Media (AI/SM) is reshaping humanity, an impressively wide and growing body of work points to a diversity of better ways to design, develop, govern, and apply these systems. But real progress on reversing the current destructive path remains slow and fragmented. To limit the harms we are already seeing – and guide us all toward the benefits we hope for – we need to roughly agree on a few high-level normative and architectural framing principles that are simple, broad, and widely acceptable enough to drive a whole-of-society effort.

[Note that I frame this as applying to "AI/SM," because AI is subsuming the role of social media -- I hope the the Coalition will recognize that fusion, and correct the current failure of the AI hyperscalars to address the pro-human failures of social media that they seem to be recapitulating -- in ways that promise to be even more deeply destructive to democracy and human flourishing.]

High-level framing principles

There has been a growing recognition that first social media and now AI pose serious risks to democracy and human development. Diverse remedies are emerging, but progress has been slow because dominant platform business models and centralized architectures systematically underweight public-good objectives and user rights and agency, while policy responses remain limited and contested.

These are wicked problems, with no simple solution – far too complex, nuanced, and context-dependent for any one person or group to fully understand – thus needing a broadly accepted, diverse, and continuously evolving portfolio approach. 

For the past several years I have been suggesting an increasingly broad reframing, based on a holistic systems view of the processes required:

• A full architecture for governing who controls attention, what sources and reputations matter, how individuals and communities interact (in thought and action), and whether both individuals and their communities are served by loyal advocate agents.
• Shared reliance on simple overarching normative and architectural framing principles for coherently guiding a broad portfolio of efforts – and for marshalling whole-of-society support efforts for that. The key framings (explained below) are:
• Thought as a social process.
• An architecture of Three Pillars enabled to jointly synergize and evolve through open interoperation.
• Personal (and community) AI agents that are loyal advocates for their users.
• A simple, essential, and overarching test question: Who does it serve?

• Recognition that governance of this architecture must harmonize both social media and AI as they fuse into one another:
• AI is increasingly integral to social media -- as a recent major study explains, advocating coordinated development.
• AI is becoming a social medium, as it links humans, communities, institutions, companies – incorporating social media content – and armies of AI agents link with humans and other agents.

• A long view that supports ongoing development and evolution. We are re-engineering and digitizing activities that humans have evolved over millennia, but now are being revolutionized at an unprecedented pace. Nevertheless, time and flexibility for mutual human-AI adaptation must be allowed for – as we shape our tools, and they shape us.

Framing principal 1: Thought as social process

This frames the core human process, the dynamics of the fundamental cycle of thought that enables civilization and human flourishing, as shown in this Figure 1:

Debates rage over expression as a matter of “free speech rights” in isolation – and often “for me but not for thee” – but the real issue is the broader process of how social creatures think. Attention was manageable and social influences helped guide it. Now, under global expressive overload, algorithmic feed attention agents are needed to assist in that role. Platforms have taken over that role, but fail to do it well.

Historically, word of mouth and other social mediation naturally helped us self-regulate both expression and attention. But now platforms control feeds and reputation signaling. Their engagement-optimized systems redirect our social feedback systems toward platform engagement objectives that often diverge from user and community needs, while disintermediating important components of our social mediation ecosystem.

Framing principle 2: The Three Pillars of online discourse, linked by open interoperation

The pillars frame a high level architecture for the core structures of the social mediation process, comprehending the vital synergies of 1) individual, and 2) social processes that guide one another, plus 3) the distilled reputation data that emerge as byproducts of social mediation and help guide those processes – as in Figure 2.

[*The layer labelled "Middleware" is to be broadened to say "Open Interoperability"]

The pillars are:

1. Individual choice / agency – the primal human driving process that steers our inputs through each listener’s attention context, drives individual thought, and outputs expressed ideas to the network.
2. Social mediation ecosystem – the deliberative (or reactive) feedback processes by which others (human+machine) mediate message contexts and flows from speakers to listeners, much as in the earliest kinds of word-of-mouth propagation.
3. Reputation / trust – the distillations from the other pillars – and feedback to them – evaluating speaker and mediator context as worthy of attention (relevant, valid, and desired).

These pillars rest on a foundation of open interoperation (often called “middleware” in the social media policy community), as explained below.

All three pillars are distinctly essential – because each one has weaknesses when working alone, but the others can balance those.

• Individual choice / agency is the focus of much reform effort, but there are valid concerns that poorly-mediated individual agency can lead to echo-chambers, polarization, and extremism. It is just this concern that led me to begin workshopping the Three Pillars framing in 2023.
• Social mediation is how society has always moderated individual excesses. But without sufficient individual agency, it can lead to groupthink and tyranny of the majority.
• Reputation and trust draws on and supports both other pillars, as socially-derived metadata that helps guide who and what to consider trustworthy.

The pillars work together in a highly nuanced feedback loop. Agency and social mediation generate collective knowledge and reputation, which guide further attention and interaction.

Open interoperation is the foundation for that interplay. But as computer coding increasingly mediates discourse and cultural evolution, interoperability must be explicitly designed-in to preserve the agency, flexibility, extensibility, and resilience that humans and our social systems historically developed more organically. That is in tension with the rigidity of monolithic, centralized walled gardens, no matter how benevolently intended.

Framing principle 3 – Personal AIs as faithfully loyal advocate agents

AI compounds the new sociotechnical problems that social media have uncovered, but failed to solve. Providers of AI models exert similar, but far deeper and more subtle influence over what we see of the world and how we make sense of it. In addition to parallel concerns of bias, manipulation, and misinformation, the seductive power of AI can threaten human attachment and lead from simple cognitive outsourcing toward cognitive surrender.

As we move toward hybrids of human and AI intelligence, we face the same issues of whether our technology-based agents serve us – or the corporations that build and deploy them. As we move from monolithic AIs to complexes of AI agents, the same pillars and need for open interoperation apply:

• Individual choice / agency – do we each decide what sources are used and what objectives are set?
• Social mediation ecosystem -– do we make full use of the wisdom of other individual humans “in the loop” and of the communities of humans (and hybrids) that we choose?
• Reputation / trust – do we draw wisely on other humans and hybrids, and do we have transparency into who and what we are relying on.

AI developers have made much of the idea of growing agent capability, but not of AI relationship:

• Open AI drew attention to the question of capability as “agenticity” – the ability of an AI to do things on its own.
• Others have emphasized the need to consider a second dimension of AI as “agentiality” – its relationship to those it serves as to whether it can be trusted to loyally serve them.

There is growing realization that given the superhuman complexity and dynamics of AI, our surest protection as individuals and communities is to be able to just say “Have your AI call my AI” – selecting interface agents that can be trusted to represent us as faithfully loyal advocates (and sometimes even fiduciaries with legal duty to serve our interests, not those of their builders/operators or any other party). Technology for ensuring trustworthiness of advocate services is still in early form, but gaining active development.

 
Framing principle 4 – the essential test question is “Who does it serve?”

Instead of reacting to the harms of misaligned technology, we should be building this brave new digital world to support fundamental and broadly supported normative objectives. I suggest that as we design, develop, deploy, and use these new tools – there is one simple and essential principle to keep top of mind:

• The essential test question at every decision point, for every component, is “Who does it serve?”
• All else is commentary. That commentary includes these critical sub-questions:
• Normatively: “Who should it serve?”
• Sociotechnically: “How can we make sure it serves who it should serve?

A loose, big-tent, multidisciplinary, whole-of-society project portfolio

How we govern AI/SM will determine whether it augments or impairs growing challenges to collective intelligence, cooperation, and the workings of democracy. Because no one pillar can stand alone without serious weaknesses, shared framing principles can provide common understanding, objectives, criteria, and motivation for advancing a richly diverse interoperable and adaptable portfolio.

Only through cooperation on shared goals can we develop a coherent portfolio approach to marshal the tools and guide the long-term project of sociotechnical evolution we need to re-engineer democracy for the digital era – to overcome impending threats and enable humanity to flourish. There are organizations supporting work in this direction, but cooperation remains less integrated than needed across the pillars and across AI and SM. A big-tent alliance could make that broader alignment visible and actionable. 

A practical next step would be for existing (or new) organizations to workshop framing principles, seek consensus on objectives, and improve information-sharing across a loosely federated portfolio. That structure could support diverse experimentation and ongoing evolution without imposing a single program. [Hopefully the Pro-Human AI Coalition will catalyze that, for both AI and SM.]

 
Conclusion and call to action 

We are adding AI and social media to institutions that evolved for cooperation, discourse, sense-making, and democratic governance over millennia. Yet development remains piecemeal and concentrated in corporate systems whose incentives do not reliably prioritize long-term public value, and re-engineering remains mostly reactive, with no overarching vision. Better alternatives are emerging, but remain obscure, fragmented, and constrained by platform structures and extreme concentrations of power.

The proposed principles address four questions: 1) how thought remains a social process; 2) how agency, social mediation, and reputation reinforce one another when enabled by open interoperation; 3) how personal advocate AIs can help individuals and communities ensure AIs that serve other parties respect their agency and rights – and 4) above all, how every component must be judged by who it serves.

The goal is to make our media tools intelligently social—supporting democratic freedom and human flourishing through an open, evolving ecosystem. Building it requires a broad alliance that can coordinate this sociotechnical evolution without suppressing diversity and subsidiarity.

Reinforcement of My Comments at "Can Middleware Save Social Media?"

Thanks to Gabriel Tyler at Knight Institute for a nice summary of this stimulating expert convening on the question, “Can Middleware Save Social Media.” While it captures much of the spirit of this lively discussion very well, there are some points I alluded to that deserve reinforcement. (Full video of these sessions is now online.)

My reinforcements here relate to just what middleware is, how it can be help save social media, and whether it can do that without government intervention to facilitate and mandate interoperability with the dominant platforms.

At the highest level, I want to reinforce my point that there are "two ways you can come at middleware," and that one way is exemplified by Bluesky as “a greenfield development” of a new social media ecosystem. Proponents see this new architecture for social media (based on the innovative generativity of open protocols) as having potential to mature and grow enough user acceptance to replace the dominant platforms, even without government intervention.

There was little discussion of this second path after my comments in the first panel, and admittedly, it remains very unclear whether this kind of ecosystem might succeed at obsoleting the platforms. And of course there is no question that government intervention could greatly facilitate both paths to middleware. But current US policy trends do not augur well for such intervention.

That leaves this glass as arguably half empty, but given the forward-looking work being done in the Bluesky ecosystem that I alluded to -- including the accelerating impetus to build out Eurosky as a counter to the power of the dominant US-based platforms -- I see that glass as half full, even without US regulatory change. If Eurosky development scales successfully, that could spill over to attract demand, and thus supply, for similar services in the US and elsewhere. (The other speakers may be less hopeful about this path than I am, but it would be ironic if it turns out to be a European desire for independence that saves US democracy from social media.)

The other point I would add context to is that, as Gabriel put it, “middleware alone cannot resolve the deeper forces shaping online discourse.” That is true, but we should not view this as a matter of "middleware alone." 

I suggested that “middleware really is a technical enabling facility” – strictly speaking, middleware does nothing more by itself.  What it does is enable services to be built on top of middleware, thus facilitating access to a wide range of  “middleware-enabled services.” My comments referring to my “Three Pillars” framing (see this diagram that I was unable to show at the event) were meant to suggest the unlimited variety of services that could be enabled without permission from any dominant platform -- to make social media much better (whether the platforms like it or not). It is these middleware-enabled services that are built on top of middleware that can save social media.

This bears on the issues discussed in the keynote conversation that followed: concerns that middleware alone cannot save social media -- that instead of a focus on user control, regulators should focus on restriction of addictive or deceptive design practices and commercial surveillance, or supporting other prosocial remedies. The pillars framing emphasizes that middleware (in the narrow sense of the technology enabling interoperation) is not a solution in itself, but it facilitates all manner of solutions -- middleware-enabled services (not just for user control, but also for social mediation and socially-derived reputation, and much more) that can work in concert through an open networked ecosystem. 

This open market ecosystem could offer tools that are less addictive and that do not extract and abuse personal data, and that support greater community roles in social media that would encourage people to demand such tools and choose to use them wisely. Government can certainly facilitate movement toward this more open architecture and to the services that might enable, but user desires for better social media, alone, might drive this shift. That has already brought over 40 million users and growing independent development into the Bluesky's AT protocol ecosystem, even in its highly immature state.

Whichever way we get there, the real promise of middleware is to reduce platform control over the media tools that human discourse depends on. Once fully open interoperation and "exit" is enabled, further sufferance of platforms is not needed to apply a wide range of alternative solution strategies. If you build it, they can come -- and it can work seamlessly (with all of a user’s data and their social network). Then you just have to get them to come, and to find a sustaining revenue model. Ecosystems based on open interoperability and extensibility regularly succeed at that in surprising ways.

[Minor edits 4/19/26]

Speaking on Social Media Middleware/Interop, Personal Agents, and AGI

My busy month as speaker at interesting workshops and panels:

Governing the AGI Commons: March 4 brought me to Oxford for this one-day workshop organized by Google DeepMind and the Cooperative AI Foundation. I brought a perspective on how the harms of social media might be recapitulated in even worse form in AI, and how multiagent systems that support individual and community agency as loyal and trustworthy advocates in working with counterparty AI systems hold promise to avert that. It was Chatham House Rule, so I can't report on much, but a brief report from the organizers is planned, to be linked from here when available

Interoperability as a Design Principle for the Digital Economy: On March 24, I walked a few blocks for this one-day workshop at NYU Stern Business School co-sponsored by UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society, speaking on a panel on Designing Interoperability in Social Media. Discussion was catalyzed by an in-depth paper. My understanding is that video and/or decks will become available (to be linked from here). 

Can Middleware Save Social Media?: March 26 brought me to the National Press Club in Washington for this Knight First Amendment Institute full-day convening on this question, speaking on the first panel, Introduction to Middleware. Video of these wide-ranging sessions with leading experts is online and well worth viewing by both newcomers and old hands on this issues.

Conscious Commerce: Delegation, Personal Agents, and the Future of Consumer Power: On April 3, I spoke as an advisor to a Consumer Reports project team of Carnegie Mellon grad students seeking to help specify pro-consumer, privacy-first AI systems that enable consumer agency, trust and conscious choice. This was fun adventure combining my recent work on directions for user agents for social media and AI, with newly emerging opportunities to apply my older work on "post-sale market data" ecosystems for product usage data and ratings, and on the FairPay framework for adaptively win-win relationship commerce.

My thanks to the organizers and participants for these very stimulating events.

[Update 4/15:] This feeds into my efforts to build on my Three Pillars framing and related ideas on personal AI advocate agents, with the idea of an overarching scaffolding for better focusing the combined effect of diverse strategies for alignment and governance of “social” media as it fuses with AI (and moves toward AGI). The objective is to make our media tools intelligently social -- to fully support democratic freedoms and the flourishing of humans as social creatures. This is very much a work in progress -- to workshop it, I have begun sharing my working outline as a discussion draft, and inviting feedback.

Attention Is Power -- Reframing The Future of Free Speech in The Online Era

Versions of this article were first published in The Bedrock Principle, published by The Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University (11/4/25) and then in American Purpose on Francis Fukuyama's Persuasion Community on 11/13/25).

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Debates about free speech online are misframed. Instead of focusing on what content should be removed or censored, we should instead focus on restoring the underlying social and technical structures that enabled free speech to function well in the past. A crucial part of that structure is freedom of attention (which I have previously referred to as freedom of impression, as a complement to freedom of expression). That is the ability of individuals and communities to choose what they listen to, rather than having platforms decide for them.

Humans are deeply social creatures who speak to be heard and understood by others. We make sense of the world, flourish, and find resilience collectively. Free speech is not just a matter of individual expression. It’s a continuous cycle: ideas are formed, expressed, and shaped through social interaction, then fed back into human minds.

The scale and speed of online discourse, and how interactions cascade to influence one another, make it essential to understand that freedom of expression for all speakers, across diverse communities, is feasible and prosocial only when there is freedom of attention for listeners. It’s also only workable when that expression is supported by healthy processes of information sharing and assessment that function as a social mediation ecosystem. Censorship is unnecessary and counterproductive, as it harms the rights of both speakers and listeners, and weakens those processes of collective intelligence.

Censorship is Not the Answer

We are now engaged in fierce debates over how to address the aspects of free speech that are not in need of repair. Demands for “freedom of expression” have devolved to zero-sum battles over which side gets censored. Most people want platforms to take some responsibility for reducing harm, but when content policy teams focus on removing “lawful but awful” content from the public sphere, it is neither effective nor desirable. Instead, it entrenches the inherent dilemmas of removal as a form of censorship:

• The problem is an intrinsic matter of viewpoint: “free speech for me, but not for thee.” Who decides what viewpoint is true or good?
  
  
• It is also a practical matter of power: how can we find nuance and balance between top-down control (rules imposed by governments and platforms) and bottom-up freedoms (users and communities setting their own norms and practices)?

There are more effective, win-win remedies than removal, as many have argued.* We forget that we traditionally protected our attention by walking away or changing the channel. Speech may, indeed, have social consequences, but that is no justification for deplatforming. 

Thought as a Social Process 

Online technology surfaces a neglected question: “Who controls your attention?” Before the digital age, people naturally had control over what they paid attention to. We were free to walk away from speakers; free to associate or not. Now, platforms control what appears in our feeds and from whom. Instead of choosing for ourselves, we are fighting over how these centralized platforms make those choices for everyone—because they do it badly.

Consider this diagram of Thought as a Social Process.

• Thought and Expression happen at the individual level. Current battles are for or against censorship of expression, but expression is just the starting point of the full cycle of thought as a social process.
  
  
• Social Mediation is the rich, nuanced stage where others process and interpret what’s been expressed, pass it on, and feed it back (or not). When expression is censored, it nips this cycle in the bud, as governments, platforms, or institutions prevent certain expressions from ever reaching the open social mediation layer. Historically, social mediation occurred through the natural dialogue of communities, institutions, and shared cultural spaces, often guided by trusted intermediaries such as clergy, editors, local leaders, and other influential figures. This layer introduced natural forms of friction through reflective feedback, social norms, and editorial choices over the use of limited channels. These processes encouraged both individual and collective reflection, allowing reputations to form and circulate, thereby slowing the spread of raw information and adding context before ideas reached wider audiences.
  
  
• Attention is our selective awareness of what comes back to us: which of those mediated ideas are impressed on our attention to shape new thoughts. This is where freedom of attention comes in. This is the listener’s right to decide what should feed into their attention. Historically, people exercised this simply by choosing who to listen to or what to tune out. That was how word of mouth had worked for millennia—expression to one or a few, then propagated more widely in successive cascades of cycles (if deemed worthy by enough listeners).

Broadcast technology and the emergence of mass media changed that dynamic. Control of social mediation shifted from the soft power of influential intermediaries to the imperious gatekeepers of costly and limited channels, which constrained freedom of expression (as only partially balanced by policies such as the Fairness Doctrine in the United States and impartiality rules in the UK, which required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints).

But now online social media shifted dialogue back to a word-of-mouth style of person-to-person propagation, driven by individual posts, likes, shares, and comments—but algorithmically, at dramatically increased speed and scale, connecting anyone to anyone globally.

The problem became that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Online feeds became a “firehose” of information, rushing far too fast to drink from. As a result, social media feeds now function as attention agents to help listeners manage what they see by ranking and filtering content to allocate their attention.

The “original sin” of the ad model incentivized platforms to build attention agents that compose and optimize feeds, not to serve users but to maximize engagement for ad revenue. That oligopolistic capture of our attention now threatens democracy and our very sanity. Dominant platforms have concentrated power in a few opaque algorithms that are easily manipulated to amplify chaos rather than distill collective wisdom. This also bypasses and drains vitality from the social mediation ecosystem that previously constructed “social trust,” which is essential to democracy and is now being lost.

Compounding this, advanced AI is merging with social media, making control over our attention an even more opaque problem.

We can no longer maintain freedom of speech unless our attention agents protect our freedom of attention. This is an aspect of the freedom of assembly or association recognized in the First Amendment and similar human rights formulations. It works because “harmful” speech does little harm if not propagated widely—and without human social processes, we cannot determine which speech we should propagate.

Taking Back Control of Our Attention

Barriers to reform include the fact that platforms have little incentive to yield the control that is so profitable, or to serve smaller or demanding communities—and that few people have the skills and patience to manage their feeds directly. What is needed are trusted and prosocial intermediary attention agent services that we can independently select and combine for ourselves, to support the needs of our communities. Open interoperation protocols, or “middleware,” can make this possible by sitting between users and social networking platforms.

The obvious pathway to regain control of our own attention is to open up today’s dominant platforms, for example by expanding on the proposed ACCESS Act, to “[a]llow users to delegate trusted custodial services … required to act in a user’s best interests through a strong duty of care, with the task of managing their account settings, content, and online interactions.” Currently, that path seems to have been stalled by platform resistance and government dysfunction.

Another way to regain control of our attention is through a growing grassroots movement to build open social media ecosystems. This emerged with the Mastodon-protocol-based “Fediverse” and is now gaining momentum with the more deeply interoperable Bluesky-protocol-based “ATmosphere” that already serves some 40 million users.

What we see now is just embryonic—green shoots of a revitalizing sociotechnical ecosystem. The power lies in the open ecosystem of attention agents, built on these protocols, that will enable people (and their communities) to filter and shape their feeds for themselves, rather than relying on platforms to do so. Some misunderstand Bluesky as simply “lib Twitter,” but that is just part of a broader shift toward user-controlled filtering and community-shaped information flows that can enable a user-selected diversity of “vibes.”

One early example is BlackSky, a community-mediated feed service drawing on human and machine judgment to filter Bluesky feeds that are protective of black people. Grassroots initiatives like Free Our Feeds, the Social Web Foundation, Project Liberty, and Protocols for Publishers, as well as feed service tooling providers like Graze, are working to catalyze development of this open “pluriverse.” Meanwhile, reactions to the dominance of American platforms are fueling the EuroStack/EuroSky initiatives to create new and more open infrastructures to serve other communities.

Either way, a key objective is not only to enable our freedom of attention, but to protect it from “enshittification”—the extractive practices that arise when users are captives of entities that control not only their attention, but their connections and data. To prevent that, these new initiatives aim to make “exit” (switching to alternative services) easy, thus keeping real competition in play.

Shifting moderation from top-down removal to more bottom-up, community-mediated management of attention raises concerns, such as the creation of echo chambers and the responsibilities to protect vulnerable users. As I will address in a companion piece, restoring reliance on community-level social mediation, supported by “least-restrictive” ways of adding “friction,” can make those issues manageable in democratic ways that support the fullest practical levels of free speech.

Beyond Technological Solutions

We urgently need a whole-of-society effort to reframe how we understand free speech in this new digital era, and to reshape social media and AI so they support and augment both individual freedom of attention and healthy prosocial mediation. This is not just technology, but an evolving sociotechnical process that includes:

• Improving public understanding of how and why free speech works in more positive ways, without the need for censorship, so society can find a stable path between tyranny and chaos.
  
  
• Reducing censorship, removal, and deplatforming as rapidly as is practical.
  
  
• Creating space for innovation by opening markets for supportive and open media-tech infrastructure, regardless of whether dominant platforms participate.
  
  
• Supporting the growth of alternative attention agent tools and services like the Bluesky and Fediverse ecosystems that are open, flexible, and extensible, even if they’re still developing.
  
  
• Fostering and nurturing the essential interplay of both individual freedom and reinvigorated communities and institutions in online discourse.
  

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My thanks to the many people who have helped me formulate these ideas, and to Jacob Mchangama and Francis Fukuyama for encouraging me to write this and a planned companion piece to go deeper on revitalizing humanity’s social mediation ecosystem (and for invitations to help organize a major project on middleware, and to the Global Free Speech Summit). And thanks to Audrey Hingle for editorial support.
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*For example, Goldman, Gillespie, Stray, and Riley and me