Netocracy2023

Phil, what do you think about NetoCracy in 2023?

I still think it's incredibly important. For me there are 3 huge ideas :

• Imploitation, ie the economic activity of investing links to gain links, still seems absolutely crucial to defining what makes something netocracy and not merely capitalism-as-usual or TheAttentionEconomy flavour of capitalism. This is an economic determinist model of social evolution I still find extremely compelling and matching what goes on around us. This was always, IMHO, the heart of Netocracy theory.
• The second idea, which originally didn't seem so big to me, but now looms colossal, is the idea that the netocrats will use InformationOverload as their weapon to fight each other and suppress the consumtariat. By Information Overload I mean "too much information", but also excessive production of FakeNews, Disinformation, HyperNormalization and all the other WormtongueArts. Furthermore, EpistemicInstability through continuously changing information / "truths".
  This is the most problematic aspect of the information society: the generation of EpistemicInstability and destruction of the MemeticEcosystem as both an economic and political strategy. This is what's really overthrowing the ProjectMan ideals and institutions, from TheEnlightenment ideals of FreedomOfSpeech (including in their TheOpenSociety / CriticalRationalism forms that I used to wholeheartedly subscribe to). It's impossible to see these the same way once we understand that falsehood and anti-consensus are not simply accidents or even products of deliberate mischief, but the toxic effluence of systematic netocrat economic activity. (PostModernismAndInformationOverload, TheEndOfConsensus, EpistemicInstability)
• The third, related idea, is that not only will truths find themselves relativised to locality in FilterBubbles, but so will moralities. The end of consensus is also the end of a hope for a universalizable moral code. Which again is the end of the liberal (OnLiberalism / Enlightenment ideal. Bard and Soderqvist said that morality would be replaced by Netiquette : the rules of particular networks, enforced by gatekeepers who include and excluded you from membership according to your behaviour. The irony is that AlexanderBard now seems to spend a lot of his energy ranting against "censorship" and in favour of some universal values of freedom of speech. But this shift from universal freedom of speech to network-relative netiquette is exactly what he said netocracy would bring.