This is a full version of a piece aiio wrote for UFO News 8. Subscribe here:
In the local Copenhagen coffee shop, a tote bag hangs on the wall. It says: "Filter coffee, not people." A girl, hunched over her phone, scrolls—follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow, like, like, like—barely interacting with her friend sitting opposite her. She's using the app that seems to know what we like before we even think we do. It serves us our tastes, uncannily reading our minds. She's using the app that has become integral to how we communicate. Social apps have become our lubricant, loyally spurting out relevant content just when we run out of something to say.
But they monetise our eyeballs without our consent.
The attention we give them feeds into their perpetual need to farm our attention more. We fall for these trends that present themselves as our interests; we rush to post the fit pic from that new coffee shop, for a moment of dopamine we get from the likes that fly in shortly afterward.
It's like we're in invisible cellophane bubbles, the same info regurgitating inside, getting filled to the brim with noise. We are still living in a world where these wrappers are made by corporates determining our tastes and interests through targeted ads. We're full!
Instead, we want to eat real content from real people, not from synthetic algorithms. We don't want a manufactured community where attention is subsidised by monetised eyeballs.
Onchain media built on Web3 social graphs is a breath of fresh air. There's an opportunity here to amplify real voices from real people, access collectively organised knowledge and embed keys to navigate different environments.