Sam Liebeskind
@samliebeskind
product partnerships at New_Public; previously community & growth @ Geneva
Sam Liebeskind
The polarization footprint doesn’t offer a silver bullet. But it gives us something we’ve long lacked: a rigorous way to quantify how much our feeds are shaping division. It opens the door to real accountability — not just for platforms, but for regulators, designers, and society at large.
“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
A quote by Charles Bukowski
To me, the real promise of democracy and the promise of politics is this question of, “How do we build a world in which people don't feel like they're pawns in a game that other people are controlling?” Ultimately, that’s what organizing is about.
It’s possible to provide these services and argue – as the Panthers did – that these services are an alternative to unfair government services. It’s also possible to argue, as Occupy has sometimes done, that these services are an example of what we want governments to provide and a way of pressuring government to do the right thing. This second... See more
How do we make civic crowdfunding awesome? - Ethan Zuckerman
Fuller blames this thinning on two factors. First, extreme partnership has led to “an intense focus” on specific political outcomes, rather than developing better democratic processes. Second, large private foundations and governments are putting money into their own agendas, rather than tools to empower everyday citizens.
In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative
The essay describes this broad paradigm—which emphasizes the benefits of deliberation and sortition—and explains why it is insufficient for understanding or acting in a healthy democracy. We argue that we should instead focus on enduring democratic publics and how they shape collective behavior. That would raise very different questions. How might... See more
Henry Farrell • AI and Democratic Publics
Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect « Bumblebee Labs Blog
web.archive.orgThe Evaporative Cooling Effect - The Evaporative Cooling Effect is a term I learned from an excellent essay by Eliezer Yudowsky that describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming. Each layer of disappearances slowly reduces the average quality of the group until such a point that you reach the people who are so unskilled-and-unaware of it that they’re unable to tell that they’re part of a mediocre group.