Daveed Benjamin explores how the next level of the Web can enable us to transcend the negative behaviors, content, incentives, and side effects of the web, escape the cognitive cages of the attention economy, and collaborate at the levels needed to address our planetary challenges. He seeks to enable safe decentralized space above the webpage that is sovereign and owned by communities. Within this environment, we can have knowledge building through the contextualization of online information, accountability, and the connecting of national/regional Internets.
This emergent environment–the Overweb–entails a multi-faceted shift from:
- Users to participants
- A flat and static web to a multi-layered, hyper dimensional web
- Fragmentation to ubiquitous context
- A harmful attention economy to a knowledge and collaboration economy that is a force multiplier on value
- Personal computing to collective computing a la Doug Engelbart
- Centralized content placards and attention traps to participatory discourses through the ideaspace
- And very practically, weak to strong browsers.
A Stanford engineer, Benjamin is an author of Bridgit DAO’s forthcoming book, The Metaweb: The Next Level of the Internet, to be published by Taylor and Francis in Q3 2023. He has contributed to the first three editions of the Future of Text. Benjamin has two patents and one provisional patent. As a “Shift Shaper,” his work focuses on altering systems of consciousness to catalyze the deep shifts that humanity urgently needs. As a founder of Presence Browser, the Overweb, and the Web4 Foundation, Daveed’s focus is decentralizing knowledge, protecting cognitive freedom, and building collective intelligence.