Nathan Schneider: The new generation of online movements needs to clarify its goals, structure, and responsibilities

Source: Web3 Revolution Podcast

Compiled by: JC, Alice Fang, Hana Huajiang, and Chain Catcher

Introduction: Web3 Revolution is an English podcast exploring the Web3 space, connecting the forefront participants, actors, innovators, investors, and KOLs in this social experiment through dialogue. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Xiaoyuzhou, Spotify, Apple Podcast, RSS, and other general podcast clients. This podcast is sponsored by Mask Network (Mask.io). This episode is hosted by Mask Network (Mask.io), Hana (Twitter: Hanachanweb3) and Hannah Hehe (Twitter: hannah_h2s).

Hana: Hello, welcome to Web3 Revolution, I am your host Hana. This is a series exploring the next generation of the internet. We will invite builders, executors, and active participants of this internet revolution to have conversations on the show. This podcast aims to educate and share information, providing accurate industry insights (listeners can subscribe and listen to the show on Xiaoyuzhou, Spotify, Apple Podcast, and other general podcast clients). The podcast content is not investment advice, and in this episode, I will co-host with Hehe.

Hehe: Hi everyone, I am Hehe.

Hana: Today, I am very pleased to have Nathan Schneider as our guest. He is an American social movement journalist and writer. Since 2015, he has been a professor in media studies at the University of Colorado, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of "Everything for Everyone," shaping a radical tradition for the next generation economy.

Nathan is one of the early advocates for the democratization of Twitter ownership, and he is editing Vitalik Buterin's upcoming book "Blockchain Philosophy: PoS Will Empower Ethereum," which will be published this September.

Welcome to our show, Nathan.

Nathan: Hello, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Hana: Nathan, you have been documenting various social movements like Occupy Wall Street. As a journalist, you started using Twitter extensively during the Arab Spring in 2011. Twitter seemed to enable you to follow local events in real-time and connect you directly with the activities of those events. From my personal experience, Twitter represents a vast information field. Ten years ago, if you were a cool young person in China, you might have downloaded a VPN for Instagram or Facebook, and if you were a curious young person about the world, you might have downloaded a VPN for Twitter in 2009.

The first software I downloaded after using a VPN to bypass the firewall was Twitter, or rather, Twitter was my target software because it contained a lot of uncensored political information that could never be seen on Weibo or WeChat. To me, all of this meant freedom, a space for citizens to truly voice their opinions. Following the development of Twitter's information culture, before entering Web3, human rights activists, journalists, and feminists have been very active on Twitter. So what has Twitter meant to you over the years? Why do you think people are placing increasing importance on Twitter?

Nathan: The Arab Spring in 2011 saw cross-border social movements from Tunisia to Egypt, throughout the Middle East, to Europe, and then to the United States. It later appeared in places like China. Twitter was an advanced media tool that allowed information to spread in the global public sphere and had significant utility.

However, I wrote an article in 2016 titled "The Rise of Platform Cooperativism: A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet." At that time, Twitter was at risk of being sold because it didn’t really mean much in many ways, like an ordinary tech company that could be profitable but lacked influence.

Unlike super corporations like Facebook and Google, public discourse played a special role in Twitter's growth, which seemed to be a misaligned service. Within the legal framework, public discourse is a commodity that can be traded. This is the result of Twitter's unique business model, financing structure, and legal system. It seems to include a profound question: why is such an important utility only able to exist within an American company? Why can't we transform the global connectivity of platforms into the structure of the company itself? I see some examples, like the Green Bay Packers, which is a community-owned football team in the United States.

At the same time, I think there is an opportunity to innovate here. I believe that new things like Web3 make us realize global public utilities, and we need to start learning how to own and manage these global public utilities to deepen our connections and resist the fragmented internet landscape.

Hana: Yes, I have some thoughts on how social networks generate utility that I would like to discuss with you. I strongly agree with your earlier statement that Twitter is like a public utility or public company, even though it currently still operates like a private company.

If we consider Twitter's news network as a public utility, what characteristics do you think this type of public utility and company would have? What would its ideal vision be in terms of governance and economics?

Nathan: I think it’s still too early to imagine the perfect vision for Twitter; rather, we should think about how to build that structure and discuss what we really want. When we released shareholder proposals in the company in 2017, we didn’t demand that the company adopt a specific structure. Instead, we suggested that the company invest some resources to explore aspects like user ownership. Therefore, our real goal was to get user feedback.

Thus, we compared it to other organizations, such as the Green Bay Packers, owned by individual fans, or the United Press, owned by different media companies. Members can share ownership. This is an exploratory design space, and there have been similar situations in the past, like in the case of American railroads or electric companies. Although they are private companies, they have some special social responsibilities to the public because they monopolize resources that everyone relies on.

Clearly, large social media networks have some of these characteristics. Therefore, we need to think about the operational models of these types of public utilities, not just that we share a network with public utilities or live in the same country or state. In fact, these public utilities have global effects.

Hehe: You mentioned that in the past, private companies acted as intermediaries, providing some public goods and facilities. Do you think this is a transitional form?

Nathan: In the years following that 2017 event, I worked with many like-minded individuals to explore mechanisms for community exit, which is essentially about how startups can become communities. And this is a story without a specific model or strategy. It is exploring in its own way what options we have and what we can do.

I believe this process is a kind of risk-taking, and I hope to see more community enthusiasts leading to more community-owned companies in the future. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and community operation will make Twitter more accountable. Because we operate within the economic system in the U.S., which is designed to prioritize the power of corporate shareholders over that of community users.

It is very difficult for community members to obtain financing, while it is very easy for Elon Musk. If we had a system to help communities finance themselves, we could develop internet infrastructure ourselves, reducing many bad experiences. If we had a framework built around community ownership and community, then in a system driven by investor returns and interests, community ownership could be realized at various levels. Therefore, when a startup or project starts, there needs to be a scalable design space that is accountable to stakeholders.

The design space depends on the founders and builders. For example, what is the right accountability? What responsibilities are we striving to achieve? And ensure that builders can see returns. Therefore, Twitter is a special case; it represents a broader systemic issue. After 2017, more investors became interested in community governance, and many companies are starting to do this, like Open Collective, which aims to sponsor open-source projects and has publicly stated its intention to transition back to the community.

These examples indicate that we still have not reached the level of a company like Twitter. Startups are trapped in 20th-century corporate regulations, and we need to find an effective way to make it more suitable for the various products we are currently building.

Hehe: I feel we are at a breaking point, where there is a struggle between old and new systems, and this new desire, even if it exists, may have very diverse pathways to it. It is up to the entities themselves to decide what strategies to adopt.

But the diffusion of power, moving from centralized companies of the 18th century, like railroads, towards decentralization, and then gradually towards community management. Is that correct?

Nathan: Yes, but I don’t think this is a stable path of progress. For example, in traditional British corporate law, cooperative regulations played an important role in the development of the industrialized world, just like investor ownership regulations. For instance, rural electrification in the U.S. was not achieved through government companies or simple public ownership, nor through investor ownership, but through the development of cooperatives, which essentially solved the rural electrification problem. My grandfather grew up on a farm and did not have access to electricity until the coop emerged.

Thus, these regulations have been very powerful tools in the past, and we need to remember how to use and adapt them. In a sense, we are beginning to realize that we have put too much power in the hands of the investor ownership model while neglecting the community ownership we have always had. For example, tools around Web3 can restore community ownership. This is very exciting. At the same time, there are very clear signals. However, in Web3, there is a tendency towards investor ownership and the power and logic of investor control, turning projects into speculative assets rather than public utilities or public goods.

Therefore, we are at a very important crossroads, and we need to be vigilant that this technology capable of achieving community ownership cannot be guaranteed.

Hehe: I think the argument that technology alone cannot save us is a good one, and Hana has many questions about the acquisition of Twitter that she wants to discuss with you.

Hana: Yes. I think last week Elon Musk absolutely surprised everyone; the entire process from proposing to buy Twitter to actually completing the purchase was very efficient. I seriously thought about his tweets after making the decision and wanted to ask Nathan for his opinion. One tweet was, "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing new features, making the algorithm open-source to increase trust, and defeating spam bots. I look forward to achieving this by working with a company and a user council." It seems that Elon Musk has shared many ideas over the past five years. What do you think about this whole situation?

Nathan: I find this very concerning. Currently, Twitter is not as bad as he says, and it may not necessarily operate better in the future. What worries me is that this feels like a power play, like a very wealthy person trying to seize an opportunity for community discourse. Perhaps he will do some good things with Twitter, but there are some real dangers. For example, Musk put Tesla at risk during the acquisition process, yet Tesla is a very important company for him.

Especially in the U.S., Tesla has driven the electric vehicle market and forced other companies to strengthen competition. And Musk is putting the company at risk, which is somewhat concerning. He has always been a risk-taker. Therefore, my credit rating for him is not very high; this acquisition is just a game for a wealthy person.

Lastly, regarding Musk's historical view of democracy. He claims that democracy is his interest. I remember once at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, he said there would be a natural democratic environment on Mars. However, when people voted on proposals, he ruthlessly suppressed the union organization at the Tesla factory. Therefore, this is a person with a historical record who always talks about democracy but takes no real action. When Musk faces collective power, he sees it as a threat and danger. I think this is very concerning; what does democracy mean for someone with such great power and so many followers? Refusing to listen to others' opinions, even refusing to see collective power appear in his territory.

So I just observe that the richest person in the world has just bought one of the most important public spaces in the world, and this fact does not affect my tendency to have a skeptical attitude towards him.

Hana: I also want to discuss his top-down methodology and his personality. Elon seems to be a strong-handed boss; he previously pushed Tesla and SpaceX by handling many new functionalities and quickly achieving so much. What do you think this management style will have on Twitter?

From my perspective, he will become the decision-maker for Twitter. How do you think we can check the fairness of decisions?

Nathan: I cannot predict what Musk will do or what kind of impact it will have on Twitter. The ideas he shared with Jack seem to show us a vision of decentralization. Jack Dorsey developed the Bluesky app as a decentralized Twitter, which is a truly viable path, somewhat like community ownership, meaning no single personnel can control the development of the project, but many people can own its services.

In the meantime, we also created a decentralized cooperative network similar to Twitter called Social Point Cooperative. It is a broader network that includes many people we don’t like, but we can control the access nodes of that network, allowing us to block unwanted content. This could be a very positive direction, but I really don’t know what it will bring.

Similarly, I tend to focus less on the personality traits of an individual and more on the structural forces that can explain how things work. Musk is an ambitious billionaire and seeks efficiency in unprecedented ways. Some of the results of this are positive and significant. I enjoy watching those space videos; I think it is a wonderful contribution to humanity, but that still does not eliminate people's concerns. We all need to understand the power accumulation of this person in the past.

Hehe: You also mentioned that merely focusing on this idea is not enough; we also need to look at the core business vision, market adaptability of the product, and the interested community. Successful cooperative projects or businesses often have a key entrepreneur or someone; would you describe that as a benevolent dictator? For example, do you think Musk would be a benevolent dictator?

Nathan: I think the idea of a benevolent dictator itself is a crazy notion. It is a product of traditional models and part of the community logic of network platforms, which I call implicit feudalism. The oldest BBS appeared before the internet, where administrators had administrative control and ran bulletin board services, which essentially meant absolute power over the system forever.

From a systems design perspective, this is a convenient approach because it does not have to consider political issues. However, for human systems, this is a very poor management style, and most healthy communities that start this way eventually eliminate benevolent dictators. For example, the founder of the programming language Python was a benevolent dictator for decades, and later he grew tired of some debates and left. The community went through this entire process, exploring all these different options, and ultimately a board elected by the community formed a completely reasonable structure because there is power locking in both technical systems and corporate life.

There is no need to make a dictator benevolent or malevolent; we know how to create better systems and how to establish accountability within systems. Dictators want to concentrate power to some extent, at least to have a plan, including how to exit the platform. I have been establishing community rules; this tool can help groups figure out governance structures within the benevolent dictator template.

Whether it is our country, our company, or now public utilities, accepting benevolent dictatorship as an acceptable governance strategy is a failure of imagination for me. Every organization needs a transition period and accountability.

Online systems have proven that we are all part of a community, where there is no accountability, just relying on the operations of administrators and moderators. From this perspective, we do not expect better performance in the largest systems of society. Therefore, who manages these large systems begins with our daily life practices, which is the theme of my next book, and it explores the relationship between the largest scale of daily and political life more deeply.

Hehe: This is truly exciting.

Hana: Speaking of political life, I know you often talk about community ownership. Let’s push this concept to its essence: what constitutes a community, or as a woman, a minority, someone who may not be able to obtain a U.S. green card, how can I make the concept of community more inclusive?

You mentioned that Twitter should serve as a global tool, but we need to be honest that this podcast is in English, and the network revolution mainly occurs in the U.S., so how can we ensure that this community attracts more users that Twitter should appeal to?

Nathan: I think this is a great question. I believe the term "community" is a vague concept because it means many different things in a company; it could be employees of one company or users of another. It can be seen as a specific historical community, an ethnic community, a language community, or some communities formed by their marginalization.

For example, much of the cooperative movement in the U.S. comes from the experiences of African Americans, who were excluded from traditional economic systems and used cooperative structures to gain autonomy and control over their economy.

So what is our understanding of community? I hope we do not always overlook this question but recognize that we need to truly constitute our community. In the 20th century, we have been discussing boundaries and global issues. The global society is generally understood structurally as relationships between territorial states. Therefore, different territorial states form cooperative structures in the United Nations or the International Criminal Court based on trade transactions or other events. Today, people want to constitute communities without relying on specific nation-states as the primary carriers. People may live in a country they do not strongly identify with or seek to have their desired voice.

We need to rethink how to delineate the boundaries of global communities, where we rely less on representatives of national territories, and I want to have such discussions. Shadows of this have already appeared in various online networks, where people can participate and connect without needing permission from their specific leaders. I think we need products of this structure, and it has long been overdue. We are at a moment of significant reduction of nation-states and borders, which could be a major turning point.

Previously, our primary identity was territorial; our politics and humanity were largely defined by where we lived and were born.

Hehe: The formation of this new culture, I think, requires a new definition. From the digital communities of the past few decades to the current Web3 and cryptocurrencies, all of this has entered a new level.

Nathan: So it is certain that the last wave of so-called globalization movements should bring many popular applications. Because it is the globalization of capital, not the globalization of people. It enables businesses to spread across the globe and change local policies.

Most office workers lack mobility, but we are fundamentally troubled by the movement of capital. This again reminds us that we are at a crossroads; when we design new global networks, what flows do we allow? What do we design our networks around? And concepts like rights, public, and common? Or do we design them around the concept of private goods? Similarly, I think there are many ways you can imagine Web3 and cryptocurrencies just deepening the patterns of the first wave of globalization.

Let capital flow, let people be locked in prisons.

Hana: I agree with your description of it as a prison. When I was younger, it was very difficult to browse information online, and over time, I had to put website addresses into the browser. Now, users just need to swipe their fingers on the screen, and algorithms recognize and push the content they like. Historian Julian Barnes once wrote that history is the certainty that emerges where memory fails and documents fail.

So in the long-term development, as a professor and journalist, do you think Twitter will become one of the most important archival pieces of information in human history? What does Twitter mean for humanity?

Nathan: That’s a very interesting question. For example, the Library of Congress has collected archives of Twitter as part of its archives. I am a bit afraid that my ramblings on Weibo will become a long-term record. I think such a massive archive is deceptive because when we look at this data, it is easy to overlook what is missing. So much data makes us think we have everything. Those colleagues doing big data-type research love Twitter because it is easy to scrape data from Twitter, unlike Facebook and other platforms, and then do some interesting statistical work.

The question is, what might Twitter not see that other networks could? What parts of ourselves do we showcase there?

I have a friend with social media influence, and expressing opinions on social platforms is now his life and livelihood. He tells me that this network has become his ideal workplace, where he can post anything he wants to say. For him, this is a very reasonable choice.

However, historic figures in a position must recognize that the truths expressed online can only be partial truths. This goes back to the issues of ownership and control. Twitter and these social networks are not objective truth holders. They are shaped by managers and motivated by incentives. And these incentive mechanisms are very important; they guide our behavior on the platform in various ways. If we take Twitter as a historical document, we must recognize that it is shaped by business models, ownership, and the accountability of the platform; the data is biased, and it is guided by algorithms that are managed by those trying to profit the company, whether early investors, the public stock market, or Elon Musk.

If we take it as an important record of humanity, then we need to pay more attention to the managers above in deciding what these incentives are and what the responsibilities of this company are.

Hana: Yes, we have spent a lot of time discussing Twitter. Additionally, you are a very prolific writer. So why not discuss your upcoming new book?

Hehe: I am really excited to read "Blockchain Philosophy: Proof of Stake Will Empower Ethereum." So, at this moment, what can you share with us as a preview, and what excites you the most about this book?

Nathan: This book is something I have been brewing for many years; I first learned about proof of stake when I interviewed Vitalik in 2014, just like many of us experienced. He is a unique voice. Reading his articles over the years and some academic papers about them has been a real pleasure. Vitalik is an unusual writer, and what I have experienced in editing is that his style tends to be conversational.

When I first read the Ethereum white paper in early 2014, I was genuinely impacted. At the same time, I felt that his work was remarkable. Many people who are just starting to engage with cryptocurrencies read his blog posts, just trying to launch their own altcoins, while I think he is a very interesting thinker, the soul behind current crypto projects.

Therefore, to make it easier for those who have not been involved from the beginning to access these works, I provided some background for this book, edited some brief introductions, as well as annotations and a glossary. Thus, for newcomers facing technical jargon, this book will serve as a bridge.

Additionally, the Ethereum community has many better interpretations, and all of this can be traced back to when Vitalik first introduced the theorem at the Bitcoin conference in Miami, where he talked about many great things that could be achieved. The content we collected in this book includes whether you like cryptocurrencies? More importantly, what do you do with it, and how do you design it? What assumptions do you bring to it? This is the direction we should discuss, far beyond the question of whether it is encrypted or not.

Hehe: I think the discussion of technology is very important, and providing educational content for the general public is also meaningful. Do you plan to make this book a required reading for students?

Nathan: No, if I do that, I would have to fill out various disclosure forms. I do not teach a cryptocurrency course, but currently, our school has at least two blockchain-related courses, and we gathered the teachers of these courses together for a small event.

Therefore, these events have begun to influence students' interests and raise questions like: as a scholar or teacher, what is our role? Is it just to say in class that this is the greatest thing ever? Is it to bombard people with this question? To what extent should we emphasize these things? How much trust should we give to those who say this is the future? These are the problems we are striving to solve, but no matter what it looks like now, there is enough truly creative work happening in the world, and this direction is worth paying attention to.

Hehe: Absolutely, we must maintain this critical mindset and observe the changes these technologies bring us. In this decentralized social network space, where do you think the future theorems lie?

Nathan: This is truly perplexing. I feel that the theorem is shifting from being the main interface point that people use to becoming composable interfaces, and this transition has good technical support. The most interesting thing at this moment is the governance market; there will be many different second-layer protocols. If there are many different protocols for people to choose from, what will their governance look like, and what choices will they make?

Currently, these networks are just making the design process easier and allowing people to focus on solving basic scalability issues. We also must recognize various human rights issues, for example, the manipulation of election events that occurred in the networks of two ethnic groups in Myanmar.

When it comes to digital currencies, the dangers will be amplified. How do we begin to encode value ownership into these networks? I think this is the next frontier, and this emerging diversity space will create an open environment.

Now, much of the discussion I see here is just about our operations, discussions about specific products and such. If these networks become new tools connecting the globe, capable of doing what existing global institutions have failed to do, and ensure awareness of human rights discourse, awareness of not crossing boundaries, and limitations of earthly barriers and borders. The challenge is that the network needs a different kind of investment than private profit because the way private operations require players to pay fees to create a sense of commonality among the public.

We will co-invest in these matters, even without short-term financial returns. There is a reason why the largest companies in the world are highly regulated. I believe regulations actually benefit businesses, such as non-violence, human rights, and other systems.

However, the future economy may not prioritize them. I do not know what the future holds, but I think it depends on whether we recognize the responsibilities within the networks being designed.

Hehe: We also hope to see more active civic participation, like new political discourse, including what Hana mentioned about stateless individuals. Perhaps this new network era can allow us to engage in some historic policies.

Therefore, I think we witness a very exciting network movement from the social and political levels outside of technology.

Nathan: Recently, people have felt anxious about citizenship because it can be used as a language to provide opportunities for other non-citizens to communicate. But we do need a language that aligns with humanity, not just staying with humans, but creating a motivation that allows these networks to recognize the dignity and value of everyone.

Hehe: I really appreciate Nathan's perspective. Thank you for sharing.

Hana: I think this is a perfect conclusion for today. Thank you very much, Nathan.

Nathan: Thank you very much for having me.