You are part of the world’s biggest club. Seven billion people live on this planet. Two billion of us are now online.
As citizens of this online society, it’s time to figure out what we want and what we can do to achieve it.
Society 5 is a progressive project to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society. This is a collaborative discussion. We believe the future of our society should be discussed and decided upon democratically.
Everyday, more of us are living more of our lives online. Everyday more of us go online to work, play, socialise, shop and learn.
Our online lives – our email, social media, search, websites and communities – are no longer separate from our ‘real lives’, but an important extension of us.
Of course, many of us live lives barely touched by the world online. Many of us continue to struggle for the basics to survive. Yet the ubiquity of the Internet and its proliferation across the world has changed lives everywhere.
As French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in opening the 2011 ‘eG8’ Forum.
“This an important moment. We are at the cusp of the emergence of a new form of civilisation, a new society made possible by the emergence of the Internet”.
This is a moment of great potential – but potential for what?
In the same speech praising the social and economic benefits of the Internet, Sarkozy went on to make a case for government intervention.
“The States we represent need to make it known that the [online] world is not a parallel universe, free of legal and moral rules… Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people’s lives, it would be contradictory to exclude governments from this huge forum. Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies.This is a moment of great potential, but we are also at a tipping point where the future of society as we know it is being determined.”
We are in the midst of a digital landgrab in which the technical and social foundations of the Internet are under threat and its transformative potential is being turned against us. Sarkozy is half right. A new form of society is being brought about by the Internet.
The Internet is a distributed model of publishing, communication, power and enforcement. As such, traditional hierarchical models of decision making, organisation and thinking should not define the sole vision for the future.
We have a slim window of opportunity for us as citizens of the Internet to establish the future we want, and hopefully the Society 5 project will provide a platform for that dialogue and action.
Our core goal here is to stimulate discussion and collaboratively figure out some possible paths forward. We plan to collaboratively define the technical and social characteristics that make the Internet the enabler we know today. We hope that this work will inform the debate around the future of the Internet, and move us away from the impractical dualistic debate of an open vs closed Internet. We plan to integrate the discussion and feedback from this site into a book later in the year, with full attribution of contributions.
This phase of the Society 5 project will run for four months and will include many ideas to explore, including the possibility of alternative models for online citizen representation. Please use the Table of Contents to click through to discussions of interest.
We look forward to designing the future with you,
Will & Pia
