Thread · 4 tweets · 21 Jan 2022

I also disagree that we can't be in the space of completely remaking the system. In fact, in the specific area of online data and advertising, from the side of what tech standards can regulate (quite a fair bit), that's exactly the space we're in. And we could use some scholars!

We're looking at turning every site into a silo that can't share data, and then see how to maintain some important economic functions like attribution. A good recent example is IPA: docs.google.com/presentation/d…

You can't learn about individuals, but you can learn a few things about populations that click on specific ads. What principles do we govern this with? I don't know, and I don't have a great starting point. People reinventing the system from scratch could help here :)

Similar questions with systems like Garuda that could be used to replace opaque, private mechanisms with ones that are collectively governed. Can we make them trustworthy? Prosocial? Viable? Either way, there's both room and potential for big changes. darobin.github.io/garuda/