“The AI group is making open source instruments that mimic the functions of all the big social media sites.”
“So people can shift over to this new set?”
“Yes. And it will protect their data for them using quantum encryption.”
“Then China probably won’t let their people use them.”
“Maybe not. China is under huge pressure to change, so, unclear how that will play out. For everyone else, using these sites means they’ll control their data, rather than it being used and mined. That privacy can then be a resource to them. They can sell their personal data if they want. That plus the security of encryption, and the public ownership of these sites as a commons, should be enough to entice every user on the planet to shift. Publicize it, make it easy, set a date, be ready to handle the influx, boom.”
“How many do you think will shift?”
“Maybe half. After a few years, everybody.”
“So, the decapitation of Facebook.”
“And all the rest like it.”
“Replaced by a system owned by its users, in effect.”
“Yes. Open source. A distributed ledger. The Global Internet Cooperative Union. GICU.”
“Is that a good name?”
“Is Facebook a good name?”
“Better than GICU.”
“Okay, think of a better one. Then if it works, it will serve as the operating platform for ICU.”
“Which means,” Mary prompted, playing along.
“International Credit Union. A people’s bank. The team has set that up too. Lots of bank mirroring, and credit unions are already a thing. This won’t be quite like a credit union, because it would be an open network of people who make a distributed issuance of credit, issuing carbon coin fractions to each other on proof of good action on carbon. People deposit their savings and create new value in a customer- and employee-owned distributed ledger. Their bank, as one function of their YourLock account. It invests mindfully as a group mind, a kind of planetary mind, that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities. Also, a place to go if everyone removes their deposits from current private banks at the same time. Those banks are so over-leveraged that they will immediately crash. Then individuals have to have a safe harbor. For-profit banks will go running to central banks to ask for bail-out, and legislatures will panic and agree to let central banks create however many trillions the central banks recommend. That’s been the template so far. So, for any planned attack on private banks, best to have a safe harbor ready. Then you can tell the legislatures to approve central banks’ bail-out QE, but only on condition of buying equity in them.”
“Nationalizing the banks, you mean.”
“Yes, but that puts it too simply. Central banks take possession of private banks, having saved them from bankruptcy or death. Good as far as it goes, but legislatures also need to take possession of their own central banks, by increasing political control of them. It’s a double action. You need both.”
“Will it work?”
“Is it working now?”
Mary sighed. “Point taken. Can you get the future into the names somehow? Since we’re the Ministry for the Future?”
“The internet interface name could be, I don’t know: Children, Own Your Data. COYD?”
“That’s terrible.”
“Some people are not good at names.”
“I’ve noticed.” As for instance, the names Janus and Athena had nothing to do with each other. But that was neither here nor there. “Let’s make the name a game. Get the whole gang down to a dinner at Tres Kilos and see what they come up with.”
“As long as you’re picking up the tab. Pitchers there are ridiculously expensive.”
“Right.”
“And so, what about these projects?”
“Oh yes,” Mary said. “Let’s try it. Something has to be done. We’re still losing.”
That night at Tres Kilos, over dinner and a couple pitchers, they came up with some ideas for names for the Facebook replacement, which Mary scrawled down on her napkin: DataFort, EPluribusUnum, WeDontChat, OnlyConnect, A Secure and Lucrative One-Stop Replacement for Your Many Stupid Social Media Pages, TotalEncryption, FortressFamily, FamilyFortress, HouseholdersUnion, Skynet, SpaceHook, WeAretheWorldWeArethePeople, PourquoiPas, Get Paid To Waste Time!
“Maybe we’re still looking,” Mary concluded as she read the list on her napkin. “Although I do kind of like WeDontChat.”
55
La Vie Vite! It was a time.
The gilets jaunes shifted the model for how to proceed, away from May 68 or any fainter impressions of the Commune or 1848, not to mention 1793, which it has to be admitted is now like a vision from ancient history, despite the evident satisfactions of the guillotine for dealing with all the climate criminals sneaking off to their island fortress mansions. No, modern times: we had to get out into the streets day after day, week after week, and talk to ordinary people in their cars stuck in traffic, or walking past us on the sidewalks and metro platforms. We had to do that work like any other kind of work. It wasn’t a party, it wasn’t even a revolution. At least when we started.
But soon we saw that people wanted to talk to us. They all knew they were being used, that they were just tools now. I myself was a kid, the main thing that got me out there was how much I hated school, where I had always been made to feel stupid. I was slotted into the bottom classes early on and my life was sealed at that point, on a track to servitude, even though I knew I had real thoughts, real feelings. So the main thing for me in that initial break was to get my ass out of school. Although parenthetically I have to admit that I later on became a teacher.
Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go. No one had to direct us. It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse, and I think that’s what happened here, some trigger or combination of triggers, the extinction of some river dolphin,
