David Gelernter’s giant macaw, Ike, has taken a tumble. One moment he was there, offering agreeable squawks as Gelernter spoke, and then, in a flash of lightning, he wasn’t. Ike is fine, the 64-year-old Yale computer scientist assures me, simply stunned. “Luckily he’s as light as a bird. So he can fall great lengths and it doesn’t bother him,” he says. Now where was he? Oh yes, Gelernter was in the middle of telling me about his plans to revolutionize social media—emphasis on 혁명.
On Thursday, Gelernter published Medium의 게시물 declaring his grievances against our favorite social media overlord, Facebook. He’s directing his ire into a new company called 혁명 포 퓰리, a social network that emphasizes individual data ownership and democratic rule by its users. Hence the patriotic timing. “For me, this is an opportunity to take some action on a public issue that I think is really important,” he tells me. “Who owns the cyber landscape? Do we all own it, or do five incredibly rich people in California?” Gelernter’s message to those of us living under Facebook’s imperial rule is “Join or die.”
For now, though, Revolution Populi exists as four men each with the title cofounder—a former Goldman Sachs vice president, a doctor-entrepreneur, and a PR executive, plus Gelernter—and a rather tempestuous whitepaper. Technical details are … scant. So scant that, after much pondering, it’s difficult to piece together exactly what Gelernter, who holds the title “chief visionary officer,” is proposing. Other than to say that yes, it will be “on the blockchain.”
Gelernter has built a reputation for being ahead of the technological curve, starting with his work in parallel computing and data mining, and later as a pioneer of the social web. In a 1997 profile in WIRED, he described a vision for 21st-century computer science that would center on human interaction. It would be as dependent on design and social science, Gelernter said, as any technical improvements.
His project at the time (along with PhD student Eric Freeman) was a social network called Lifestream. It took the form of a digital timeline of life’s totality—a perpetual stream of documents and messages that could be arranged, sorted, and shared with others. Lifestream was popular among colleagues in his Yale department, Gelernter says, but attempts to commercialize the technology sputtered. A godfather of modern social networks watched from afar as Silicon Valley upstarts grew into giants. “I’ve been on the sidelines since then,” he says.
Well, not completely on the sidelines. Many Lifestream ideas were enshrined in patents owned by Gelernter’s company, 거울 세계, named after his 1991 book that described our coming habitation in virtual reality. The company later sued Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, for infringing on its patents with their various stream-like products, such as Facebook’s Timeline and Apple’s Time Machine and Spotlight. (One Apple lawsuit resulted in a $625 million jury award for Mirror Worlds, which was later reversed by a judge. Mirror Worlds settled other claims against Apple and Microsoft.)
With his new venture, Gelernter wants to again challenge those companies. The idea, he says, is to build a social media app on top of a new blockchain ecosystem. He describes the proposed network as a “public square” (a term coined in 거울 세계, he notes) in which everyone owns their data and can sell access to it for cryptocurrency. The rules governing that platform will be based on the US Constitution, and can only be changed by a user vote. It will also support an open ecosystem of apps.
Gelernter’s team will be leading off with their own app, which will start as a music streaming platform where users pay artists directly. (Revolution Populi’s CEO, Rob Rosenthal, launched a now-defunct music app called MyFyx in 2016.) But their ambitions soar far beyond that, to becoming a centralized hub for music, TV, movies, social media, even web search, in the vein of the original Lifestream.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/mirror-worlds-creator-displace-facebook-blockchain/
