How Gather will change the world
Every idea should have a post with this title.
The better world
4 in 5 people worldwide demand strong action on climate change, yet governments continue to sit on their hands.
The reason elected officials have been able to remain flaccid on climate action is that communities have been unable to organise.
The hoovering effect of billionaires on capital means that more of the "buffer income" that might have existed in previous generations for things like home maintenance, medical crises or rest, has been consumed.
As politicians have given control to billionaires, reducing the rights of people who work, and increasing the competition between us, more and more of our income has flowed towards the basic necessities of food, shelter and health, and there is no buffer left.
People complain about paying tax when the pavements are broken, playgrounds are trashed, roads are ruined, and councils complain about not having enough money to fix things.
It's not that there isn't enough money - it's that there's too many billionaires.
By increasing house, food and health prices, and making jobs less secure, people are having to work harder and harder, longer and longer hours, for less and less pay, to maintain a fraction of the savings their parents were able to maintain. That means that the time for things like building relationships with neighbours has been eroded.
When we are at the absolute limit of exhaustion, and can take the easy option of ordering food instead of asking for help, when we can pay for a babysitter instead of doing a trade with other parents, when we can dial a rideshare instead of asking for a carpool, we lose opportunities to build networks with the people who live around us.
This 'service economy' has grown enormously over the past decade and a half in response to the increasing stress of survival, and suddenly we are dangerously on our own - millions of islands living within meters of each other.
Deliberate disconnection
At the same time, we've sacrificed the social skills to connect with strangers. When we're absolutely exhausted from the pressures of staying alive, and the easier options of apps and social media present themselves, of course we opt for them instead of real human effort, vulnerability and hard work.
As a result, we have less connections we can ask for help. We are more vulnerable, and more likely to suffer crisis or be exploited.
I don't want to imply that this has 'just happened', or that no one could have foreseen the consequences. This was entirely predictable.
I've worked as an algorithmic ads specialist for nearly 20 years, so I understand more about how social media works than most people. When the public were shocked by Cambridge Analytica, I was shocked that it had taken so long to come to light. When no law prevents it - why wouldn't people use ads to gain political influence?
The biggest shock should have been that Facebook made no meaningful policy changes afterwards, and your country made no meaningful law changes in response. If Cambridge Analytica did the exact same thing in New Zealand today, the most that could happen to them is a $10,000 NZD fine - a drop in the bucket for them. And to be clear, that fine wouldn't be for breaching our data privacy - there's no penalty for that. It would only be if they ignored a Privacy Commissioner notice about it.
In the absence of penalties, we must therefore assume that algorithmic election engineering is occurring as you read this. We must assume that you have been fed content on social media in the lead up to an election that explicitly aims to get you to question your preferred party, sow doubt, drive rage, and get you to change your vote.
If there's no disincentive, and people can make huge money out of it, why wouldn't they do it? We have to assume it's happening right now.
Say I'm selling male haircare products. I know my target customers spend the most when they're feeling most vulnerable. So I can make a Meta ad - right now - that targets men whose best friends got engaged within the last 3 months. That are single, that share a house with flatmates but compulsively scroll real estate listings and research personal finance. That scheme for a better life that is always out of reach. Meta gives me these targeting options straight off the bat.
It calculates these things about you, determining your entire detailed psychographic profile, by watching exactly how you behave online and on apps. Your device knows your location, so it knows the people who are around you too. Meta watches what you search for, what questions you have, what you look up, and what the people around you look up too.
This is common knowledge by now, but the implications don't seem to stick with people. Of course I can target ads at people in swing-vote areas, spreading discomfort, suspicion and rage about the other political party. Any motivated group could do it in under 6 minutes.
The problem with ads
Meta gives advertisers a large sweep of invasive ad targeting tools because it makes its income from advertising. If you scroll past an ad for male baldness without looking at it, it still adds that ad to the profile it's building on you. So if you visit a haircare site 6 days later, Meta counts that as an ad success, and the haircare advertiser gets charged for a click from that ad.
What this means in practice is Meta's entire business model - every single decision that dictates their 80,000 employees and their $1.7 trillion dollar business portfolio - the whole business model comes down to getting you to scroll over more ads. Because then they get paid more.
To put 1.7 trillion into perspective (we have to keep doing this to understand how much we are being exploited) - the sun is 4.6 billion years old. If Meta paid a dollar a day for every single day since the birth of the sun, when the universe was just a raw, molten baby (1.7 trillion days) they would still have $20 BILLION dollars left over. You would need to make $1 million a day or $700 a minute to make $20 Billion in your 50 year career. And obviously, those are US dollars.
The only logical outcome of this, is they are fundamentally incentivised to keep you scrolling on their apps for as long as possible. Every engineering and design decision Meta ever makes must be driven by this value: how do we get people to stay on for longer.
No matter what weak provisions people put in place around age verification or — actually no one has done anything else. No one has made them stop engineering addictive mechanisms, or made them flag suicidal intent, or warn bullies, or report child porn, or reduce harm to people with disordered eating.
No matter what weak provisions people put in place around age verification, the base business model remains the same - keep people scrolling for as long as possible. The result of this drive is to show users as much inflammatory and divisive content as possible, because this is proven to make people read on for longer.
When Meta added 'angry face', 'laughing' and 'sad' reactions to supplement the traditional 'like' on posts, they gave the angry face and other reactions FIVE TIMES the algorithmic power of the 'like'. So if a post had angry reactions, the Meta algorithm would send it to the top of your feed, blasting it out to every single person in the network - everyone would see it, making Meta a volcano of turbid rage and divisive hate before they were exposed, and changed the weighting.
The reason they gave posts with the angry face 5x more reach, is because rage keeps people scrolling.
This fundamental fact has been behind the vast polarisation of societies, school shootings, the vortex of hate that young men are falling down, the grotesque skinnyrexia trends and the mosque murders.
And no one has done anything about it.
Instead of making social media illegal for under 16s, Australia should just make it illegal to show under-16s ads online. Without the motivation to keep them scrolling, the horrifying content disappears. I wish lawmakers would do a free 5-hour Coursera course and actually understand the technology they are legislating. Youth bans have never worked. Lawmakers have the power to change the toxic effects of the algorithm - but they have to start at the business model. Everything else is a bandaid.
The obvious
So we know social media is bad. X's Grok AI is generating fake revenge porn involving children, and no one has penalised them. Substack profits off platforming white supremacists who make it dangerous for minorities to walk home at night, and their shareholders rub their hands in glee. And Meta is trapped in an attention-sucking vortex that its business model won't let it escape. Ever.
This is not going to get better in profit-driven tools. They simply have to show more ads.
This is where Gather comes in
By reversing the business model, we reverse the effects.
Gather is a not-for-profit. There are no ads.
It shouldn't be that revolutionary.
Without ads, there is no incentive to keep people scrolling for longer. There is no reason to engineer addictive algorithms, and feed users increasingly alarming and divisive content to keep them trapped.
The only motivation left is to genuinely connect people.
Meta and Tik Tok's algorithms prioritise the most divisive content, and push it to the top of your news feed.
Meta's Andromeda update means you're starting to see more and more and more content that's not from people you follow. This is by design - it's to replicate Tik Tok in showing you the content it thinks will keep you hooked, rather than the content you've chosen to follow. This is to keep you on for longer.
Gather's Seed Feed prioritises the most uplifting content, by the people closest to you, who have done the most work to help their communities.
Meta's algorithm encourages you to post hot selfies, to gain attention and feel validated in your physical appearance. Hot selfies get the most likes, and shoot to the top of the feed. It hooks into the reward center in our brains, and makes us want to post another as soon as the clamour quietens down.
This is individualistic behaviour - it's popular because it encourages you to compete with the people around you, seem more cool and attractive, and look good as a result.
Gather's Seed Feed encourages you to contribute to your group. It rewards group-first behaviour, like attending your club's events, meeting up with members close to you, doing volunteer actions, and completing tasks that help your group's goals. These actions shoot to the top of the Seed Feed, and get you the response that makes you feel valued.
But you're valued for your contribution, not for some warped perception of how popular or attractive you are.
Meta's algorithm will have you eating on a rooftop alone so you can take a great photo that makes you look deep.
Gather's Seed Feed will have you inviting 6 neighbours over for a potluck to get to know them better.
And this is how we change the world.
Connection as climate resilience
David Suzuki, the environmentalist, famously said last year that the fight against climate has been lost. Governments have failed to do anything meaningful, and so we're headed for at least 3 degrees warming in the next 40 years.
This is 3 degrees on average, but temperatures over the sea are obviously lower. So on land, they're expecting this could be 6 degrees warming. Where I live, it's 12 degrees in winter, 24 degrees in summer. By the time I retire, I can expect 18 degree winters - this is hot enough to swim in - and 30 degree summers. A third of the earth's land will probably turn to desert from this heat, and tropical diseases like malaria that are carried by bugs who stay in defined temperature zones will be able to cover the globe.
David Suzuki said, because the fight against climate change has been lost, we must turn our focus to neighbourhood resilience instead.
This means:
- having somewhere to shelter in a crisis if your house is unstable
- nominating a place to store medical equipment, gas bottles, a generator and food for the community
- knowing who grows vegetables, who stores fresh water, who has solar power on your street
- who will need the most help without power
- how you'll communicate with each other if cell towers and the internet go down
How many people can answer these questions today?
The answer is, no one. And it's not because we're lazy or antisocial. It's because the mechanics of social interaction have undergone the most rapid, dramatic change in history over the last 10 years thanks to social media and on-person devices, and we've been left disconnected.
It's not your fault you don't know your neighbours. It's hard. It's vulnerable. It involves skills we don't have anymore.
But this can all be healed.
Gather makes the hard work of building community easy.
It takes 2 minutes to create a group for your neighbourhood and invite people to join.
Once you've set it up, people get celebrated each time they invite people in, write an encouraging message, create a task to help the group, and complete a task.
That's how community contribution works. You show up, you do the work, and you be consistent.
Gather's group-building mechanics work for childcare swap groups, volunteer organisations, political campaigns, potluck clubs, language nights, climate groups.
Anything that would be better with more people.
And that's how we change the world.
By making it easy to connect and contribute, without the noise, without the algorithm, without giving money to billionaires.
Gather is a not-for-profit, funneling money back into the communities it serves.
Looking forward
We see a future where everyone knows the people who live around them. You don't have to like them, or get on with them, but you do need to know where to find the things you need in an emergency. And no one can do that alone.
A future where volunteering is made easier and more rewarding, so more people do it. More composting clubs, more beach cleanups, more repair cafes, more vege co-ops, more shared childcare, more carpooling, more walking busses.
A future where young people feel confident and loved, because they have real-world connections with the people around them, and are recognised for their contributions to their groups - not for the way the algorithm thinks they look.
A future where we've not only reversed the sceptic drain on self-esteem of ad-driven social media - but we've actually built a better alternative instead.
Where your time is valued.
Where your community is connected.
Where people help people.
Gather - Welcome to the world of support.