Social Media – A Check, A Balance, or A Blank Check?
Mentor: Peter Huk
Two thousand years ago, Plato imagined Socrates in conversation with his circle, attempting to bring clarity to questions of leadership, government, and democracy of his time. The first-ever democracy was about a quarter of a century-old when Plato started to question the foundational concepts of self-government. Nowadays, American democracy is a quarter of a century-old as well. Its foundational concepts are being tested and challenged by its very participants. I imagine Setocras, the first-ever artificial intelligence capable of semantic comprehension, in conversation with its creator, Ian Topal, and a team of engineers who are attempting to design a new form of social media. Half fiction and half social and political commentary, the project tries to remain grounded in the Socratic method of reasoning from scratch, of solving problems by gradually stripping them of their complexity. Topal and Setocras are in conversation with their circle, attempting to bring clarity to their project: how to design social media so that the values of American democracy are preserved?
Read the abridged version of Marie’s project The Orthoverse Unpack
