Can we build a properly secure and democratic social computing platform?

We published our new long mission statement.

(Version 2.0 - September 4th 2020)

The future wellbeing of humanity rests primarily on an expansion of the democratic, solidarity and civil liberty principles to the global level, and to our digital spheres of information and communication.

Social media should be democratised.

It is irrational to let a handful of tech billionaires be in charge of what information we read, how we assemble and organize, what privacy we can get - and saving every little detail about us to push us their clients' products or candidates.

Current dominant social media, and even the most secure messaging systems, gravely abuse our civil freedoms and manipulate, and that of our closed ones - and we are virtually forced to use them to participate in civic and social life

Democracy depends on meaningful civil freedom and a free market of ideas in Cyberspace, and proper democratic regulations is the only way any free market in any industry has ever been created.

But the governments of this World have clearly decided to let monopolies, cartels and state hacking entities rule our media sphere.

These platforms enable innumerable malicious actors to deeply intrude in our privacy, and to deeply manipulate our thoughts and behaviours - through the lack of verifiable security and through the design of user interface and feeds - in order to convince us to buy their products and vote for their candidates. 

While these abuses affect all of us, the majority of hacking and manipulation resources are aimed at those that control money  - like the wealthy, corporate and financial executives - and those that control politics - the politically-exposed, such as politicians, elected officials, journalists, and swing voters in selected territories.

We need to take the matters on our hands!

We need democratic social media. We need user-controlled social media.

Otherwise democracy becomes completely empty. Otherwise, me, you and our close ones will continue to be abused in our civil freedom, hacked in our finances, and manipulated in our opinions through feeds that are controlled and hacked by powerful others.

We need to build international democratic organizations, where we the people, our representatives or a random sample of us, have full democratic control over how our communications spheres are governed. 

We can do it without asking anyone’s permission, within current laws, as current big tech did.

Yet, democracy is difficult. And democracy in cyberspace is even more difficult. But, as Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." 

We need to create a cyber-social system that will resilient to huge state pressures, that will be democratic yet decentralized, technically-competent yet citizen-accountable, and open for anyone to create a new social or media organizations and innovations.

To achieve constitutionally meaningful levels of digital privacy and security, we need to apply new principles and paradigms, the Trustless Computing Paradigms. These prescribe that we need to eliminate the need or assumption on unverified trust in anything or anyone, throughout the entire supply-chain and lifecycle, and ensure extreme levels of security review in relation to complexity down to the CPU design, chip fabrication oversight and hosting room access. Ultimately, it will require subjecting all critical life-cycle processes and technologies to approval and oversight of a new ultra-resilient and ultra-democratic certification body.

Yet, developing systems so secure should, by definition, make it very unlikely and costly to be hacked even by the most advanced criminal, as well as nations, which have a record of overreach and abusing such powers, and regularly loosing their hacking tools on the Dark Net.  

So, therefore, there would a real risk that such IT could be abused by criminals, terrorists and irresponsible states to commit very grave crimes against humanity. 

It is therefore inescapable that we find a way to reconcile the need for digital freedoms and cyber-investigations, through a solution that is as much as possible win-win. As we have discovered, personal freedom and public safety are not an “either or” choice, but a “both or neither” challenge. 

The same paradigms that are needed to achieve such levels of security will be applied to socio-technical systems that include a jury of citizens in multiple countries that will be required in-person to grant or deny access to legitimate lawful access requests - overseen and regulated by a proper international certification body.

Let’s join together to realise the unfulfilled promise of digital technologies that will actively enhance and protect our freedom, wellbeing and democracy.