What if Facebook and Instagram were fragments of the known world of social media?
What if the two were flat, landlocked countries in a bigger planet—a sphere of many sources of influence—in which people can leave these platforms for more transparent and remunerative opportunities elsewhere?
What if people were to content themselves with more than content alone, earning rewards for what they write, photograph, and produce, instead of enriching everyone but themselves?
To ask these questions is to free ourselves from a business model that monetizes every word, calculates every keyword, and converts every click into dollars—without paying most people a dollar, a dime, or even a cent.
Let us, then, ask the question: What if we were to let the market dictate value, rather than accepting the diktats of Mark Zuckerberg?
What if we were to reward people for what they do?
The answer is SPINTURA: a platform with its own tokens, SPINS, and marketplace.
Spintura represents what social media should be; what it must be, if we are to avoid the ongoing exploitation of our data by a combination of monopolists and malefactors of wealth.
To say these things is not a matter of spin but of facts, starting with the difference between SPINS and Libra, Facebook’s forthcoming cryptocurrency.
Put another way, Libra looks less like a force for good and more like a brute-force instrument to sell goods and services. The currency belies its name because Facebook is anything but a statement or sign of balance.
Does anyone believe a company known for hiding the truth—for denying the truth—will now champion the truth, all because it plans to release a coin whose name connotes a commitment to truth?
To believe otherwise, in spite of the truth, is to ignore the deliberately cryptic nature of how Facebook guards its algorithm and changes its numbers, because the numbers are unreliable.
The numbers are knowable to Facebook but an increasingly unknown quantity to users and advertisers who rely on numbers to, respectively, create and sponsor content.
If, on the other hand, people can know the exact metrics concerning their content, if they can own what they produce, if they can promote, share, and earn rewards for what they do, they can liberate themselves from Facebook and Libra.
These options represent the rise of new platforms that maximize cryptocurrencies, rather than manipulating them for PR purposes.
These options are necessary to build and sustain trust.
These options reveal what social media ought to be—what it can and must be—instead of what it is.
These options are an alternative to corporate control.
To return power to the people, to empower them with rewards they like rather than unrewarding likes, to ennoble them with a marketplace that is fair rather than possibly afoul of the law, to balance power is to end the imbalance by so few against so many.
Let us dedicate ourselves to those ends, so we can enjoy the advantages of a truly free marketplace.
