Aligning Incentives: Money, Technology, and Society
How do we seed a better social internet?
Technology is an inescapable facet of our lives. It's intricately involved in how we relate to one another and communicate. Over the last 20 years, we have developed a social technology infrastructure that billions of people use every day to interact. But that technology was built with some baked-in assumptions and incentives that do not serve us in many ways. From mental heath issues, to misinformation and disinformation, to a breakdown of trust, to incitements to violence, this technology has, along with connecting us in many positive ways, created harms.
There's an old trope of "follow the money" and we can apply that here. Our social media infrastructure has emerged in the context of these important economic factors:
1. Advertising-based models in which 'attention' is the product and data can be commodified
2. Venture-scaling approaches where growth matters more than any other metric
3. The increase in corporate power that allows publicly-funded infrastructure and individual labour to be used freely in service of extracting profit for a few, even at the expense of the overall economy
Aligning Incentives is a project that seeks to explore the financial aspects of developing prosocial technology (including tech that supports community, civic health, peacebuilding, as well as more carefully designed social networking platforms) from the perspective of financiers. While many explorations about in the world concerning responsible tech, they often leave out many of the nuances that are important for investors and funders.
California Kickoff Event
Agenda:
9:00 AM Registration & Coffee
9:30 AM Presentation of Research Plan and Themes + Discussion
10:15 AM Conversation with Eugene Leventhal, Metagov
10:45 AM Break
11:15 AM Re-imagining a better social internet from the capital supply perspective (Workshop)
12:00 PM Conversation with Rob Romero, Civic Health Project
12:30 PM Lunch (Provided)
1:15 PM Workshop: New Models for Assessing Capital Return and Social & Economic Impact
2:30 PM Conversation with Shu Dar Yao, Lucid Capitalism
3:00 PM Convergence, Synthesis, and Next Steps for Our Research
At this kickoff event, designed to help guide our research outcomes, we will be looking at three key parts of the puzzle:
1. What business models are possible outside the advertising-based approach? What might the future look like in terms of business model innovation?
2.. How could we imagine funding for technology differently, perhaps where the returns come from something other than a "big exit"? For example, what would it look like to fund or invest in an ecosystem, collectives of technologies, decentralized technologies, infrastructures that support other economic opportunities, long-term investments, public-private hybrids, or other approaches?
3. What do investors and funders need to evaluate technology projects and companies along the dimensions of 'prosocial impacts'? How does that work today?
We're inviting a select group of people from the ecosystem to attend this California kickoff. This group will help inform our research going forward.
Through interactive workshops and conversation, you'll be part of an important first step into a future of technology where we develop social cohesion.
A morning coffee service and lunch will be provided.
Sponsored by: The Council on Tech and Social Cohesion, Porticus, New_Public, and the Internet Archive.