Thread · 5 tweets · 5 May 2021

I really couldn't commit to anything specific since I haven't thought about the Facebook case enough to make a very specific proposal anyway :) But my core point is that alternatives exist, so I can at least share some examples!

There are quite a few non-gov non-corporate governance examples in "Governing the Commons": bookshop.org/books/governin… Most are for different things but the principles are interesting. There are ways to consider an "attention commons" and govern that, for instance.

There's also a whole set of examples in Our To Hack And To Own: orbooks.com/catalog/ours-t…. I'm still reading through this book, but again that's a whole bunch of approaches to governance that fall outside the state-or-corp model.

More broadly, there are relatively large-scale governance bodies that operate on different models. IANA is a typical example, but also IETF or the W3C. Things like the FIFA too.

The point being: it's not a trivial problem, but if Facebook wanted to make actual progress on this, there are plenty of options that are more credible than the OB and plenty of smart people who could work on it.