“The Dawn of Everything” and the Fediverse: How the Fediverse could help humanity to embrace its full potential of different forms of society

TL;DR: The web is entering a new era, in which communities can move independently through the digital landscape. Parallels with the book “Dawn of Everything” by Graeber and Wengrow suggest that the Fediverse could enable the exploration of alternative social structures, just like it was in early human history. The coexistence of diverse collectives within the wide landscapes of the Fediverse could be a factual step to a more varied future of society.

In the non-fiction book “The Dawn of Everything”, David Graeber and David Wengrow manage at the same time to dismantle the legend of humanities steady growth as a linear process, as well as that of an original ideal state of equality, which makes the book genuily progressive. And the Fediverse could be just the thing to enable this progress of again opening up societies to a bigger variety of forms.

As explained in my last post, the web is currently beginning to open up again to innovation, but instead of technological, it will primarily be of societal nature this time. And because communities will be the prominent entity of this time, similar to the result of the dot com era, the powerful digital structures that will emerge from this time will also be communities; very big communities or: collectives that will have a great impact not only on the web, but on the world and humanity as a whole.

If we zoom in on opening up of living styles in the history of humanity, which has already been going on for quite some time, for example, we see an opening up of living styles beyond the christian nuclear family and new societal institutions due to globalisation and the rise of liberal democracy into what some call “the global village”:

We are already in this process of opening up but have, one could easily think, come to a point where it doesn’t seem to work anymore, because different communities clash in fights and it even seems that at this point impossible that these different societal groups will be able to live peacefully in the same society. At the same time, a development that is similar (although of course not the same) currently unfolds on the web.

Let me try to explain the process with an analogy that shouldn’t (obviously) be taken literary but works very good as a metaphor here; that is, to view the evolution of the web and how it could look like in a petri dish:

Now, let’s add some energy to it:

What happens is that live is created, in this case, the first website, which people can visit.

Now, if we add some more energy to it, we get more websites for more people to visit:

At some point, an open-source community will develop around the whole thing on which other sites can build on to build even bigger websites:

This eventually leads to big players dominating the web, while the open-source foundation grows:

Now, the growth of these big bubbles is limited, while the open-source community grows and at some point, becomes alive itself and so gives the ground for smaller, but interconnected social media servers, resulting in the social web:

Communities can now travel across the complete web, which gradually dismantles and re-orders the landscape of the web:

While before, users and their communities were limited to specific sites, now they can move across the web.

At a certain point, these communities will stabilize into what one could call “collectives” … resulting in the “Collective Web”, which is dominated not anymore by platforms or communities but collectives.

As an overview, the following graphic comes up:

And especially the second two stages (social and collective web) are interesting now, because they could give the process of humanities’ trying out of new forms of society a new ground to fully unfold.

In a sense, it’s only logical: the opening up of living styles at some point also would need to be represented in the digital world and, would need a huge amount of room to occur. The web of platforms and walled gardens cannot be the place for that, Twitter never nearly lived up to its standard of becoming the digital representation of that global village. The Fediverse on the other hand, in which it develops, could give the necessary room for this to happen. So, while in the analogue world we are already in the middle of it, on the web, we are at the beginning of this.

But for that, this opening up needs to happen. Otherwise, we drift off towards authoritarianism. And of course, this is also a thing that could happen.

Now, at the beginning of the dot com era, all the companies that would later be the big players in the Web 2.0 where already there: a marketplace, a place to meet other people, a search engine, a place to sell your stuff, etc. All the big companies that we nowadays almost simultaneously associate with the term “web”, they were all already there – so if we ask ourselves: what could be the collectives of the Collective Web? Could we think about which they could be when we look at the societal structures on the early Fediverse? Because maybe, structures like these will in a decade be one of these big collectives.

So now, one could already think about how these collectives will look like, although they will also probably merge with the communities of current social media, so it’s probably too early to tell and that’s why it’s not what we will do here. Instead of making overly hypothetical guesses at what the actual collectives will look like (if they will occur at all; which again, is not given), we will try again to look at the broader picture and apply the hopeful rise of the social/collective web on the conclusions of Graeber and Wengrow’s non-fiction book “Dawn of Everything”.

Coming now finally to David Graeber and ‘s “Dawn of Everything”, the possibilities of the Fediverse aligns with the authors’ observed exploration of alternative social structures throughout human history. Graeber and Wengrow challenge conventional narratives about the inevitability of hierarchical institutions and emphasize the existence of diverse and egalitarian forms of organization in early human history. And by that, they pose the question: if it was possible back then, why shouldn’t it be possible now?

Just as they advocate for a re-examination of societal structures, the Fediverse presents a platform that poses as an alternative to centralized social media. It echoes the authors’ call to question established norms and embrace alternative ways of organizing human interaction. In the spirit of “Dawn of Everything,” the Fediverse becomes a digital counterpart, a decentralized space where individuals can shape their communities and express their values without succumbing to the limitations imposed by walled gardens.

Moreover, the Fediverse mirrors the authors’ exploration of coexistence and diversity in human societies throughout history. Just as Graeber and Wengrow argue for the acknowledgment of various social arrangements, the Fediverse facilitates the coexistence of diverse lifestyles and ideas. It becomes a digital space where people can connect based on shared interests and values, fostering a sense of community that transcends the atomization of society and hyper-individualism discussed for example by Anton Jäger in his book “Hyperpolitik”.

In essence, the Fediverse aligns with the spirit of “Dawn of Everything” by offering a contemporary example of decentralized, diverse, and non-hierarchical social interaction. It provides a digital landscape rather than a closed space, where individuals can reclaim agency over their online presence.

How would this look like in practice?

Well, you would have a multitude of different collectives to join, usually, you will also be born into a collective. Of course, inter-collective relationships will also be possible.

Collectives have different traits, living styles and styles to organize themselves. Some organize themselves with the help of AI and extensive data collection, others don’t like surveillance and make use of open collective knowledge, while again others will try to implement non-hierarchical styles of governing.

The major point is here, that the Fediverse is big enough to give all of these collectives enough room to unfold (given that they stick to the ground rules of liberal democracy) and in this, not only let us overcome the political ground fights that we are fighting currently, solve conflicts much more effectively and to a certain degree, unite the forces of liberal democracy; but on top of that, let’s us enter a new stage of humanity, in which different societal concepts and ideologies could be actually implemented in (hopefully relatively) peaceful coexistence with one another. And this way, concepts of communities, forms of society and governing, that until now were only being able to try and discuss in theory, can actually tried out in practice; and this way, new forms will also prove themselves to work and can be applied on scale, which does not necessarily mean that it will make our lives more enjoyable, exciting or overall liveable; but it will give us a much better potential to achieve just that.

Thanks for reading. Most of what I write on this blog is heavily based on hypothesis, so feedback and discussion of it is always welcome. FYI: I got some of these ideas from the podcast “Die sogenannte Gegenwart” by zeit.de, especially the following episode, which I can really recommend: https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2022-12/mastodon-twitter-nutzer-feuilleton-podcast