Selected Items

Internet Platform Services ...and Middleware
--Saving Democracy
--Augmenting the Wisdom of Crowds
--Bicycles for Our Minds
From Social Media to AI

Delegation of User Control for Social Media Feeds and AI Agents
-- Attention Ranking / Recommender Agent Services (often called "middleware") 
-- Personal AI Agents (that faithfully serve their users)
...growing interest in limiting platform power over truth, value, and the democratic way by restoring user choice over what we feed our heads ("Freedom of Impression").
It is the policy of the United States… to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals… who use the Internet…     (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 1996)
Many of my recent writings are at Tech Policy Press (list).

Featured:

New:
  • How to Reclaim Social Media from Big Tech (As published in Francis Fukuyama's Persuasion with co-author Renée DiResta, 7/1/25) - A short, timely introduction for general readers on why “middleware” is an idea whose time has come. Middleware empowers communities to decide how they wish to balance competing democratic values—free speech, protection from harm, pluralism—even in a time of high polarization. It offers a path toward a more democratic and resilient information ecosystem, where users have more agency over their attention. The question is no longer whether such alternatives are necessary or feasible—it’s whether they can be scaled, enhanced, and sustained to meet the moment.

  • Being Human in 2035 -- How Are We Changing in the Age of AI? is a very thought-provoking compendium from the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University by Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson. My contribution was included (with those from eight others) in the Executive Summary (p. 5), and my full contribution is in the full report (p. 112). I concluded: "If we do not change direction...we may, by 2035, descend into a global sociotechnical dystopia that will drain human generativity and be very hard to escape. If we do make the needed changes...we might well, by 2035, be well on the way to a barely imaginable future of increasingly universal enlightenment and human flourishing."
NEW Video 
See this brief teaser tying together my four major works published elsewhere in 2024
  • New Perspectives on AI Agentiality and Democracy: "Whom Does It Serve?"     (with co-author Richard Whitt, Tech Policy Press, 12/6/24) - Building toward optimal AI relationships and capabilities that serve individuals, society, and freedom requires new perspectives on the functional dimensions of AI agency and interoperability. Individuals should be able to just say "Have your AI call my AI." To do that, agents must develop in two dimensions:
    1. Agenticity, a measure of capability - what can it do?
    2. Agentiality, a measure of relationship - whom does it serve?
  • Three Pillars of Human Discourse (and How Social Media Middleware Can Support All Three) (Tech Policy Press, 10/24/24) - Overview of new framing that strengthens, broadens, and deepens the case for open middleware to address the dilemmas of governing discourse on social media. Human discourse is, and remains, a social process based on three essential pillars that must work together:
    1. Agency
    2. Mediation
    3. Reputation 
    ...Supplementary to this:
  • Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware (Foundation for American Innovation and Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, 12/17/24) -- Major team effort with Francis Fukuyama, Renée DiResta, Luke Hogg, Daphne Keller, and many other notables, White paper building on this 4/30/24 Symposium that I helped organize, held at Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Assembled leading thinkers at the nexus of social media, middleware, and public policy. The only comprehensive white paper to offer a thoughtful assessment of middleware’s promise, progress, and issues since the 2020 Stanford Group paper. The goal is to operationalize the concept of middleware and provide a roadmap for innovators and policymakers. (The above two pieces extend this vision in broader and more forward-looking directions.)
  • New Logics for Governing Human Discourse in the Online Era (CIGI Freedom of Thought Project, 4/25/24) - Leading into the above pieces, this policy brief pulls together and builds on ideas about how freedom of impression guides freedom of expression without restricting it, and how combining 1) user agency, 2) a restored role for our traditional social mediation ecosystem, and 3) systems of social trust all combine to synergize that process for the online era. It offers a proactive vision of how that can enable social media to become ever more powerful and beneficial "bicycles for our minds."
  • The Delegation series in Tech Policy Press with co-author Chris Riley - four parts:
  1. Delegation, or, The Twenty Nine Words that the Internet Forgot (2/28/22)
    Why emphasis on user control in Section 230 is far more important than generally recognized, and how an architecture designed to make high levels of user control manageable can enhance the nuance, context, balance, and value in human discourse that current social media are tragically degrading.
  2. Understanding Social Media: An Increasingly Reflexive Extension of Humanity (4/27/22)
    With a nod to Marshall McLuhan, we connect the centrality of user choice and agency to the deeper social and human substrate that underpins the potential of modern social technologies to bring positive new dynamics into our human interaction.
  3. Community and Content Moderation in the Digital Public Hypersquare (6/17/22)
    Seeing social media as a "digital public square" oversimplifies, and is better seen as a “digital public hypersquare” -- a multitude of digital spaces. Social media must serve an open-ended web of spaces (/squares/spheres), layered & multidimensional, each governed by different rules & norms.
  4. Contending for Democracy on Social Media and Beyond (9/22/22)
    Conflict is part of democracy, and this age of rapid change only promises to accelerate that. Just as democracy is weakened by the prevalence of unhealthy conflict, it is weakened by attempts to suppress healthy conflict that is agonistic, rather than antagonistic.
Other recent or notable items:
Other selected items:
General issues -- Our platforms should serve us, but have take a wrong turn. (See Supportive references below.)
Business model issues -- Specific to user-centered business models for platforms
(See more on my FairPayZone blog)
Presentation Video
Other issues in User-Centered Media (to be added...)

 (These address my perspectives as an inventor in the media space and related commentary)

 Broader issues in in our intertwingled world (to be added...)

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Supportive References for Augmenting the Wisdom of Crowds and The Tao of Truth
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Where I am coming from: The Roots of My Ideas on Tech Policy 
  • As explained there, much of this work builds on my design of a network of social decision support systems for large-scale open innovation and collaborative development of early-stage ideas around 2001-3. 
  • That design is still worth reading... 
  • While the style required of a patent application is not the easiest reading, the copy I posted adds highlighting of portions that are still very relevant, and provided important added detail on many themes that are still very relevant and still forward-looking -- addressing many issues in social media that are still emerging. 
  • Notably, that 20 year-old document includes extensive details on applying the synergy of the three pillars of agency, social mediation, and reputation, supported by middleware, that I refocused on in my 11/9/23 post.
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