Facebook’s newsfeed changes are the first step to creating a virtual country.

By increasing social connections, Mark Zuckerberg is seeking to make us vested ‘citizens’ of Facebookland. It is not yet clear if this is going to turn out to be brilliant or disastrous. Either way, it’s pretty darned clever, and creates sustainable and revolutionary changes to our socio-economic systems.

Facebook has more members than any individual country — and more than Europe, North America and Australasia combined. It has created this new territory where people meet, communicate, collaborate, trade, and it becomes more and more like a country — but it still behaves like a normal business. Until now.

1. We stop being an intensively farmed product.

It’s widely accepted that in Facebook’s basic business model the users are the product being sold to advertisers. But these days are on their way out. It’s an increasingly tired way of making money, and we’re increasingly wary of its shortcomings.

And we’re not the only ones to recognise that this is a sub-optimal model. These changes suggest Facebook have found the saturation threshold of profitable advertising in the news feed. Beyond this point, more adverts make no difference, and turn us off the platform.

This threshold is not the same for all of us, and changes over time as society evolves. Facebook’s AI clusters us into behaviour and attention types and constantly tweaks our news feed to optimise attention, brand exposure and ad-clicks.

However, enough clusters are reaching the threshold that now is a good time to move on to the next thing — it has become cost-effective to make a wholesale change.

More importantly, this change presents an opportunity to lay another step to something even more profitable.

2. We connect as free-range humans.

The stated goal of the newsfeed changes is to help us strengthen our connections with our peers.

As brand posts and advertising diminish there is more space for exposure to ‘human’ content. We have more opportunities to connect and warm to each other, and bond as we find our thoughts echoed and minds expanded by each others’ posts. Over time we grow to trust and respect each other more.

With this comes influence and social capital. This can and will be harnessed.

You may have noticed that there are a lot more ‘donate’ buttons popping up. They also have a social component: we are invited by our friends and notified of their actions.

Starting with charities is smart: it’s innocuous and benevolent, gives us a reason to feel good about giving Facebook our credit card details, and makes us think less about where this might go next. And when it does go there, well.. they’ve already got your card details. #win.

It also gives facebook useful data on user behaviour in this new monetised social network: does our behaviour change, who influences which clusters, does this differ from information influencers, how to improve conversion rate, how to reduce friction on credit card transactions etc.

3. We become the farmers.

So they’ve established ‘social donating’ and are learning how to make it really effective. It is now a very small and obvious step to go from ‘social donating’ to ‘social selling’.

As an example, brands are increasingly using their (social / environmental / moral) values as a selling point and differentiator. Unlike product attributes where the message is best delivered by the company, ‘values’ messages are more effectively communicated by word of mouth, especially via someone you trust: A friend telling you that “Their product is amazing!” is way better than a company saying “Our product is amazing!”.

As revenue is shared with the people who successfully communicate the message, more people will start to earn secondary incomes from facebook.

This is part of the reason why allowing trust and potential for influence to increase in step 2 was so important (we’ll come on to other significant reasons in step 4) — it discretely boosted and optimised our influence so that when revenue sharing was activated, Facebook had already curated and primed our future customers for us. They want us to make money from this.

The social selling can be indirect and subtle: I’m likely to want to dress like people I admire, be more likely to act on their film recommendations, do the things they do, and use the products they use. AI text analysis and image recognition on their photos will surface and suggest offers I’m more likely to be susceptible to.

So far, so evil, right? It’s a sinister and crass pyramid scheme which exploits our good nature to pedal more stuff no one really needs.

But if we start to have these sort of socialised value sharing mechanisms in place, what can happen next?

Maybe this is a precursor to something genuinely bold and brilliant…I’m not saying there won’t be large chunks of evil stirred into the mix, but.. well let’s explore some more.

So we’d got as far as making an evil pyramid social-sales programme.

Firstly, let’s flip it a moment: if this influence and revenue is happening anyway, isn’t it more fair to give us a way to benefit from it?

Huge media companies and swathes of the internet are funded from revenue share on affiliate programmes. This is just taking the next step and democratising it. Rather than letting the New York Times make all the revenue from that link in the article I shared for them, I also get a little ‘thank you’.

And, after all, we all have to make a living — if Facebook makes it easy for you to effortlessly earn a little extra passive income on the side I suspect you won’t hand the money back. (Or maybe you’ll start to donate it to good causes.. and if ~2bn people do that… but let’s come back to this point later.)

The ability to use Facebook to earn revenue directly takes it to a whole new level of utility: you have more reason to use it, to maintain and develop your connections, and to be more useful to your society by engaging with higher quality and more valuable information.

By giving you more connection, more influence and more income you can become a farmer who is paid for cultivating interest.

And that interest includes getting and keeping more people on Facebook.

4. We become townspeople.

But there are two problems with adding revenue-share micro-payments to Facebook: (1) The payments we’re talking about are going to be pretty small for most of us; and (2) much of what we share and appreciate and create on Facebook is much harder to turn into revenue.

Things like new ideas, or thoughts, or poetry, or great photos don’t have a financial value: we value them, but we don’t put a financial value on them.

Well.. why not? Afterall, we humans invented money and we can use it to value whatever we want it to value, right?

Well.. kind of… the problem comes when we use money to value too broad a variety of things. A can of coke, a canoe, and a pair of shoes are real things which took time and resources to make and supply utility over time. It’s easy enough to see how one form of currency will work to value all of those.

But with something more abstract, like a selfie or an idea or an insightful comment, it’s much harder to put a financial value on it. So let’s just give it a token of our appreciation. In fact, I think it’s great, so I’m going to give it 3 tokens. (NB Medium does this with ‘applause’ — feel free to try it out when you get to the end.)

Using tokens lets value flow around the Facebook ecosystem, and allows that value to return to you and I — the content creators and distributors.

So now we have two useful currencies operating in this ecosystem which value different things: ‘normal money’ and ‘value tokens’. And every day we’re accumulating and spending them.

(Facebook could also continue and tokenise time / attention. If someone spends time on engaging with your content, Facebook could make sure you’re rewarded for it, even if they don’t ‘like’ or reward it directly.)

Suddenly we have become valued collaborators in an ecosystem. Moreover this world seems to be better than the ‘real world’ at helping us put a value on the things we value. It more completely values value. It is a superior economic system.

5. We become vested citizens.

Things in networks have emergent properties. This is true for human brains as it is for people. We are a super organism. Groups of people are no different.

Wisdom — gapingvoid.com

Our social / anthropological evolution has run thus:

tribe → village → town → city (optional) → country

This happens as we agree and find better, more ordered ways to collaborate coherently and efficiently.

market → law / governance → economy → politics

Economics is, right now, basically the global mantra. This 1980s-esque mindset that “if it’s good for the economy it’s good for the world” is clearly problematic. War and fossil fuels are awesome for jobs and economics, but that profit comes at too high a cost. Unfortunately we only put a financial value on the benefit and not the cost.

Part of where we’re going wrong at the moment is that most countries believe that they have to run in service of the economy (not the other way around), and don’t know how to change that.

We entangle currency with value. Money used to be tied to gold, so people would cross a desert, trade their possessions for a shovel, and dig up the earth. But if we said that money is tied to biodiversity or levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, we’d go to similar efforts to plant trees.

Facebook doesn’t have to keep a country running, so can do some pretty radical experiments with economics and value creation. And it has ~2bn citizens to create it with.

Facebook can provide us with the tools to create not just new markets, but entirely new value systems — which in turn can lead to innovative and scalable solutions to solve our current problems in the Real World.

For example, a favourite for me with my work is decision making. If you have a trust network and you can identity people you trust for different topics, you can make better decisions faster (and outside the party system).

We could also organise healthcare mutuals, education clusters, and much more besides. Create the mechanisms and incentives and we humans move heaven and earth to make things happen.

6. FacebookLand

With its own currencies, taxation system, organised and mobilised groups, Facebook takes on more and more characteristics of a country.

And remember, this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily evil capitalists taking over the world — this might be all about doing good. Countries work in much the same way. This is just a new type of country.

When countries do good those actions are mostly funded by taxes. Which are from engaging the population in economic activity and taking a slice. Which is exactly what Facebook is doing here.

There’s no value judgement here. Yet. It is what is it. Maybe it will work out well, maybe it won’t.

To recap:

1. The current business model approaches a plateau / decline.
2. Most business, especially those with the rather ruthless Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel involved, seek a monopoly. They want people locked in to their ecosystem.
3. For Facebook to increase lock-in they could solve more real problems (from group collaboration and event ticketing to community organising), supply tangible rewards / share revenue, or monetise attention, help us live better lives.
4. Points 1–3 require or benefit from increased social capital and connection.
5. Making it everyone’s (paid) job to increase and social capital increases the scale of the monopoly.
6. Increased social capital lets you do lots of cool shit.
7. The more effectively we can organise this capital, the exponentially greater returns we will see.
8. You can definitely use this to do evil, but it’s more stable, longer-lasting, and gives better results if you aim to minimise evil and create conditions for good.
9. So.. just like a country.

It’s worth noting in (7) that the organisation must preserve the individual’s ability to improve system health — either by knowing that they’re working towards a common and unifying purpose (fighting wars / aliens / climate change) , or imposing a manageable burden with collective benefits (eg Alexander the Great style taxes for peace and defence; national taxes for health, education, and infrastructure.)… There’ll be another article coming which talks about this!

I’d love to know what you think. Please share your comments.