Detailed Plan
In the existing information / media ecosystem, the truth of an idea is not the most important determiner of whether or not it is believed. Shared Reality is intended to change that. Part of that is an immutable source of truth, where all controversial documents can be warehoused and available in their original forms, without requiring the public to trust any person or institution. We also need this information to be presented by a distributed front-end which would ensure that the strongest rebuttals and counter-rebuttals are presented where they belong - right next to the assertions that form people's perceptions of reality.
The existing information ecosystem allows disinformation to thrive and prevents the public from having effective defenses against disinformation, propaganda, or active measures techniques.
For example:
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It doesn't matter how many people are upset about a prevailing narrative. (For example, whether vaccines do or do not cause autism.) It doesn't matter how upset they are. And, it doesn't matter how much time goes by. They can never take meaningful steps to resolve their discomfort. Their mental health and relationships can suffer.
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Any entity with enough resources can create paralysis on any issue by injecting disinformation into the public mind whenever they see public consensus building against them. Controversies and problems are never resolved. New controversies, also never resolved, are introduced regularly.
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When people want to know about climate change, they hear from pundits, magazines, and media conglomerates instead of hearing directly from actual climate scientists. Before the Internet, this made sense. Now, however, it's an outdated, inefficient, costly, and dangerous way to manage an information ecosystem.
We are currently living through an information war. Our trust has been very skillfully manipulated over decades in a divide and conquer process called Active Measures (or Ideological Subversion). Either the 2020 US presidential election was stolen or it wasn't. The existing media will not be resolving this controversy. If they were, they would have done it a long time ago. We need new tools to address and resolve this situation, or we can likely expect the worst.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' […] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."
- From a George W Bush senior White House aide, in 2004.
That does appear to be how it's sorting out. I hope we are all on the same page about that. Competing realities are being manufactured and people are living their lives inside these Big Lies. We need better weapons in the war against disinformation.
Shared Reality will provide the tools the public needs in order to protect itself from the Big Lie and other tactics which are now being used to destabilize Western-style democracies.
The key to shifting this paradigm is frictionless, two-way communication between the people who know things and the people who want to know those things - especially across social boundaries (like political party affiliation).
A centralized version of such a platform can be found in a closed beta state at <https://sharedreality.solutions> . The missing next features are a blockchain-based data store and distributed front-end. This proposal includes the creation of a read-only front-end for non-authenticated public users. Other features (for adding and organizing information, etc) will be made distributed in the future.
I'm looking for developers and others to help make this a reality. Please reach out with feedback, etc. Thank you
