How the World Wide Web is turning into the Matrix — and what’s next?
Internet was about freedom and connection. It drew people to contribute to it from all over the world. It was open and democratizing.
How the times have changed: Google now controls 90% of search, Facebook oversees 70% of the US population’s social media, and Amazon dominates e-commerce with 50% of US sales. How did this happen?
The answer is advertising.
Today’s Internet runs on advertising. Advertising interrupts us and utilizes our private data: it’s invasive, disliked, and distrusted. As a result neither advertisers nor media love it.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
— Jeff Hammerbacher
There’s a legitimate desire behind advertising: brands do look for consumers, and consumers do seek their products. In the past, advertisements would be selected and paired with the content.
The innovation was employing artificial intelligence to match ads with content automatically using the data they collected. The operators with the deepest profiles on us and the most wide-reaching panopticon have grown the fastest. Those with insufficient automation or excessive self-restraint went out of business.
The result is Big Tech. All the data and all the trust rests within these bloated companies. That’s why it’s no longer a Web of connected computers. Instead, it’s a Matrix where everything is inside the Big Tech computers.
“You are the product… delivered en masse to the advertiser who is the customer.”
— Richard Serra
The prices of advertising are going up for brands. The media’s revenue from advertising is falling.
We spend more and more time filtering out misinformation and second-guessing everything we read.
We’ve found a better way to support content sustainably. We’ve created the 1o shop that lives inside content. It’s a way to establish trust online, and trust facilitates commerce. Trust reduces friction, making everything seamless.
It will improve the Internet, and introduce brands to customers in the way they want, through authentic reviews and curations. 1o will become a valuable and long-lasting institution, supporting 1-to-one relationships on the Internet.
“You do not write your life with words. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
— Patrick Ness
Internet is useful in many ways: (1) We go online to read and research, buy products and hire services; (2) Businesses offer quality products and services online (3) Enthusiasts love staying on top of things and creators love publishing quality content.
The idea behind 1o is to bring these three sides together in a way where each is helping the other two. Instead of mixing product advertising into the content, let’s have authentic content about products. How, you might ask? Such content is created and signed by curators, our new heros.
Right now, there’s no quick way of going from such content to making a purchase. Instead, we click into the Matrix to search or browse within the Matrix. And the Matrix has an agenda of its own.
1o creates a direct connection from content to the brand. This way, we know what content a buyer relied upon before purchase. The curator is working for the potential customer, and the brand supports curator’s work with revenue.
A curator only needs to mention products. Everything else is done by 1o and the brand. 1o makes product mentions seamlessly shoppable. Purchases get shipped directly to you by the brand, quickly and efficiently.
The career of a curator becomes far more accessible with 1o. Millions of people will be able to take this career path, saving us from mediocre and dangerous products, as well as from distraction by advertising.
Big Tech doesn’t care about curators. Google lobbies for content creators to give it away for free. Facebook doesn’t want to share ad revenues with curators. Amazon is asking us to write reviews for free. 1o is needed.
“The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.”
— Rene Descartes
The 1o team combines skills in many disciplines: AI research, internet standards, cybersecurity, cryptography, web development, product design, marketing, and sales. We have developed a plan to build 1o through small self-sustaining steps. The purpose and ethics drive us.
Our product is already useful: we have created the “1o shop” — an e-commerce module that seamlessly integrates with any piece of curated content, such as an article, a review, or even a single image or video. We provide the fastest checkout experience available without clicking away from the content you’re on. This way, 1o improves the user experience, in contrast to advertising.
We facilitate trust and accountability. We’re creating an efficient machine law system — where agreements between all parties are clear, and explicit, but also easily formed and enforced. Contrast this to book-length terms of service agreements dictated by Big Tech — or laborious manual reviews of contracts that need to be manually audited.
Finally, we’re creating an actual data privacy system. 1o establishes trust between parties without either party (or 1o for that matter) seeing private data. When the data does get shared, it’s on both parties terms. Compare this to Big Tech harvesting our data at every step, and using it against us. Brands are beginning to opt out of markets that don’t give them privacy.
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.”
— John Gall
1o has several meanings. It stands for 1-to-one: for the direct balanced connection between people and businesses, and a direct balanced relationship between computers and humans. 1o is the connective tissue of the prosperous market of the future and it scales to millions of participants.
1o is also how technologists refer to the first viable version of any system. We’re creating Internet 1o.
Join us on this mission! We’re looking for investors, for partners among curators and brands, for potential team members or advisors.
It’s really easy: visit the website at 1o.io and send a short message to letter@1o.io — what do you like about our project, what can we do better?
“Pay less attention to what men say. Just watch what they do.”
— Dale Carnegie
Aleks Jakulin, computer scientist, EurAI award, W3C, Columbia University
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakulin/
Ash Kalb, entrepreneur & lawyer, cybersecurity, WhiteOps https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashkalb/
Stuart Haber, cryptographer, co-inventor of blockchain
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuart-haber/
Damjan Obal, design researcher, product designer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/damjanobal/
Miha Mazzini, writer, filmmaker and usability expert
https://www.linkedin.com/in/miha-mazzini-06212347/
Donald Rose, life coach and TV producer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/donald-rose-a56a9b46/
Edward Radzivilovskiy, philosopher and writer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardrad/
Matic Tersek, software engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matic-teršek-770b35111/
Tor Massoni Norheim, happy product lead
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tor-massoni-norheim-3350073/
Goran Ramljak, design lead
https://www.linkedin.com/in/goramljak/
Primož Zajšek, UX lead
https://www.linkedin.com/in/primoz-zajsek/
Tomaž Sešek, investor, business angel and consultant
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomazsesek/
Alexander Dimcevski, entrepreneur
Eva Petric, artist
“What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control…”
— The Matrix (1999)
