Tools Needed for Power Mismatches

on the World Wide Web and Social Media

In thinking about the power mismatch inherent in relationships between citizens and governments and customers and corporations, evaluated in the context of the future of social media and the world wide web, it is apparent that new standards for legal matters will be needed that protect individuals when dealing with organizations of all types.

These new standards may have expression in Linked Data and developing standards for social media such as ActivityPub and Solid.  I’ve written about Solid in an earlier post. In particular, new Ontologies will most likely be needed to express guarantees of an organization's freedom from conflicts of interest when dealing with an individual, and Verifiable Credentials about an organization's conflicts of interest or lack thereof will need to be verified by individuals.  This will be the reverse of the usual flow of verification, which is that an organization is usually verifying claims from an individual and not the other way around, and so it may also require procedures or protocols not yet developed.  Procedures for redress, compensation or paths to prosecution of the organization in the event of violation will also have to be contemplated and provided for, otherwise the verifiable credential will not be of much use.

Standards like these must be developed even though the direction of development of the web will at least in the near term be guided by "public private partnerships", and such standards protecting individuals from organizations such as corporations, governments and non profits may be liable to be neglected.

Such standards are better developed by representative governments responsible to individuals rather than by "public private partnerships" which are controlled by "stakeholder capitalists" with "skin in the game".

In the current environment in the U.S. at least, state and local governments would be better suited to providing leadership in developing such standards.  They are further removed from the "Great Reset" global chain of command originating in the WEF and the Bank for International Settlements. See the chart below.

G3P Chart