Friends, we are all participants in a grand experiment in consciousness and wisdom. The Internet, a marvel of technology that promised to bring us closer together and make us collectively smarter, has not lived up to its promise. The problems facing our world today are complex and overwhelming, from poverty and inequality to misinformation and cyberattacks. Hence, the term "Polycrisis"1 is emerging alongside an international organization agenda2 "to master the future."3

And yet, the words of Douglas Engelbart ring truer than ever. Engelbart's bottom-up approach was to empower individuals with technology to increase their collective intelligence and ability to collaborate, rather than relying on top-down solutions imposed by central authorities. Bottom-up is made practical by the idea of subsidiarity, which holds that social and economic issues should be dealt with at the most local level possible, and that higher-level authorities should only intervene in issues that cannot be effectively addressed locally.

This epilogue is a reflection on this bottom-up journey towards collective computing, and a call for future-conscious humans to come together, reshape the Internet, and create a better future for all. For, as we modify the old saying, "united we compute or divided we fall."

At first, we thought the Metaweb would receive a hearty welcome in Silicon Valley. After all, it solved their problems. Or so we naively thought. But as we soon realized, we were swimming upstream. We were told, "People won't install an extension," "Google will crush you," and "Many have tried this. What makes you think you can be successful?" Yet, we never heard, "Why are you different?"

Supposedly "open" organizations like the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) and Mozilla proved impenetrable. Incubator programs focused on "Fixing the Internet," like Mozilla Builders Program and Betaworks, were disinterested. The Tools for Thinking accelerator didn't think much of us. Foundations committed to stopping "fake news" like the Craigslist Foundation and the Omidyar Group gave us a stiff arm. Pharrell's Black Ambition wasn't happy with our application. We almost got a grant from the NEAR foundation. Even American's Seed Fund didn't support this sprout.

We harbor no resentment. Everything happens for a reason. Perhaps we weren't far enough along.

Like any groundbreaking technology, the Metaweb in its various nascent forms has been told "NO" countless times. The Metaweb (as we have represented it) has been denied entry to prestigious accelerators, financing, grants, speaking slots, mentorship, and other types of access in Silicon Valley. Our ideas of a hyper-dimensional web were apparently antithetical to the prevailing yet faltering wisdom that is lurching us into a future that most of us don't want. Even some leaders in the annotation space have been reluctant to throw unequivocal support behind the Metaweb.

The preponderance of evidence suggested that the Metaweb would not have its breakthrough in Silicon Valley. As George Bernard Shaw so aptly reminds us in Man and Superman, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." So we left ... .

Even after learning about the Metaweb, it is not uncommon for people to question its purpose or financial viability. A novel analysis, however, using a modified Metcalfe's law reveals that an immense amount of value is untapped. The Metaweb presents an unprecedented opportunity to capture this value for the collective good while addressing the most pressing issues of our time.

Yet the legacy web has significant inertia, and people are right to ask, "what's a big enough problem that's going to inspire enough people and companies to adopt a monumental shift in thinking around the Web?" The answer lies in understanding humanity's relationship with computers. We have evolved from having hard drives the size of commercial refrigerators seven decades ago, to now having slim handheld devices that enable us to instantly retrieve information and communicate wherever we are.

The Metaweb is the next step in this evolution, enabling us to break free from the cognitive cages of the legacy web and unlock indirect collaboration via digital stigmergy. It's a monumental yet necessary shift for us to collectively capture the value of collaboration and democratically address the most pressing issues of our time.

For clarity, Metaweb theory solves this problem:

Our personal computing paradigm traps us in cognitive cages that obfuscate our incarceration and prevent us from accurately conceiving our position, much less operating as a planetary collective. Hence, we leave tremendous value on the table and remain unable to effectively address our planetary challenges and existential threats.

The impact of the problem is clear. It is widely acknowledged that humanity is facing significant challenges, whether it be in the news, economic indicators, case numbers, or unintended consequences of emergent technologies. It is also evident that traditional solutions such as political and regulatory approaches and global cooperation are insufficient. We can utilize network mathematics to evaluate the opportunities that are being missed. While these methods are not perfect, they still provide valuable insights.

Rather than jump directly into the analysis, let's recall the story of humanity's relationship with computers, which is one of constant evolution and adaptation.

We used early computers for calculations and data processing. They were large, bulky, and required specialized knowledge to operate. As technology advanced, computers became smaller and more accessible to the general public. With the advent of the internet, computers became humanity's primary tool for communication and connection and knowledge base.

Along the way, we realized that the potential of computers was far greater than we had imagined. We saw the possibility of using computers to enhance our ability to learn, work, and play. We saw the potential for computers to improve our productivity, connect us with people from all over the world, and make our lives easier.

However, as we became more reliant on computers, we also began to see the negative effects. The Internet, which was once a tool for connection, became a source of fragmentation, isolation, and exploitation. We found ourselves trapped in filter bubbles, surrounded by clickbait, propaganda, and misinformation. Our attention was constantly being pulled in different directions, and our ability to focus and think critically was diminished. Our computers had captured our imagination and constrained us in cognitive cages with invisible bars.

The integral accident of the personal computer is that it indeed is personal, allowing a singularly focused direct connection to itself. Its purpose is to provide content, interactions, and ads for us to engage with. Other people show up as content authors and through messages. The integral accident is reinforced by the structural constraints of Today's Web – being flat, static, and centralized – which naturally led to fragmentation through competition for mindshare. There are multiple sites, apps, and communities for every perspective on every topic, often promoted with superlatives, such that we don't need to think. And with the coming flood of generative AI content, it's only going to get more muddled.

The specter of deplatforming, shadow banning, and other demonetizing controls exacerbate the web's fragmentation. For example, many alternative voices on YouTube have backup channels in case their main channel gets community guidelines strikes. To make up for income lost to demonetization, many creators offer more provocative content through Patreon channels. Common practice is now for creators to share scrubbed content on YouTube, and uncensored content on multiple smaller outlets that support free speech such as Rumble, Minds, Parler, Gettr, Truth Social, and Locals.

In this informational quagmire, rather than think critically to form our own opinions, we shift our attention among the ever-ready streams of perspectives that feed our confirmation biases, and engage when so inclined. In the ever-growing sea of content, sites, and apps, attention becomes the scarcest of commodities. Everyone competes for eyeballs. Differentiation and separation is the result. Algorithms and auctions for your attention are the mechanism.

And because computers were beholden to the individual rather than a network, the user was made to be accountable for everything that occurred to them. No one even considered making systems that held people accountable for harm to others because it wasn't an obvious derivative from personal computing or social media business models. Spammers, scammers, catfishes, impersonators, cyberbullies, trolls, and sexual predators proliferated on the Web. Caveat emptor was the unspoken rule, embedded in the terms and conditions that almost no one read; use at your own risk.

The effect was to isolate us in a dangerous new digital world. We have multiple devices, all providing direct access to the Web, yet none offer us a real-time digital presence or community, although this is envisioned in the metaverse. Yet still without accountability or safety. When we are on the web, we are alone in a digital den of invisible thieves and extractors.

Messaging may reduce the feeling of isolation. But it can be distracting when off-topic, often requiring us to code-switch. It is also mediated by the machine and often unencrypted, which has privacy ramifications. Again, use at your own risk.

We don't have safe, durable spaces for sharing relevant, contextual information so when we find things, we put them in silos, usually on our devices or on the cloud. And more of us are now retreating from the major platforms to smaller more authentic spaces that are not infested by trolls and fake accounts. This furthers the fragmentation.

Personal computing is about our direct, one-on-one relationship with the computer, and by extension with the virtual machine that comprises the wires, networking equipment, servers, databases, and organization across the planet that seek to capture our attention. Four billion of us are hooked up to the machine, many having few or fleeting meaningful connections with other humans online or IRL. In many Western countries, most people don't even know their neighbors. When you watch YouTube, when you read a Wikipedia article, when you look at your feed, when you read your email, you're completely alone.

Being isolated opens us up to exploitation by algorithms and platform business models. The funders of these systems are quick to point out the systems' celebrated network effects, yet their platforms do not provide you network effects in getting your problems solved, your questions answered, or your life improved. You don't get to meet people who can supply the missing pieces to your puzzles or connect with people that you uniquely can benefit from. Apparently, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. #FowlPlay

The machine wants your attention, money, and time. It doesn't care how you feel except to the extent that it can use that knowledge to get more from you. The machine is an extractor; it wants to suck whatever energy it can get from you. It wants you to think that being online is enriching your life so you keep coming back for more. But it doesn't care if it is actually good for you. It wants more and more of our time, attention, and money.

Many entities are part of the machine – the manufacturers who make the machine, the electricity producers and providers, the network operators, the access providers, and the platform operators. The machine includes anyone who thinks of you as a stakeholder, consumer, or victim. They may not know who you are but they have you profiled. And they compete to get access to you, through auctions and through your choices.

They bid to get in front of you; to get the chance to extract from you. They use everything you give them – your behavior, your preferences, your creations, and your data – to figure out how to best extract from you. And again, they don't care how you feel as long as you keep clicking. In fact, they benefit from dysfunctional, mal-intentioned, trolling interactions, and inauthentic activity just as much from beneficial activity. The machine is indifferent. Any virality is good virality because it pays.

Together, fragmentation, isolation, and exploitation limit our imagination, not only for what we imagine is possible for the Web but also for our online and IRL lives, putting us in a cognitive cage. Many don't believe it's there because they can't imagine the contours of the bars, which gives the machine plausible deniability. We don't see the possibility of anything different because we can't see the web changing – literally or figuratively – and we intuit that there is no real solution. Yet we know we're in the cognitive cage when we realize we aren't able to align our individual and collective interests or even act in our own best interests online.

We know there are major problems in the world, but we have no agency as singular isolated beings, floating alone in an ocean of trending content. We're just one person. Even with people, governments, and nonprofits supposedly working on fixing the Web, the problems don't seem to go away. In fact, the machine shows us they are getting worse. We're stuck in our cognitive cage, isolated online, and unable to imagine a better world. So we shut down parts of ourselves that would do something if it could. The Wicked Web of the West is now in control.

This reminds us that the way out is to go in ... together. It's much too late to pull the plug on the machine. The cat is out of the bag, and together we've made a mess out of the house. We need computers to help us organize the clean up. But rather than 4 billion separate conversations with the machine, we need the machine to see us as a coordinated network of cleaner uppers so that we can do our respective parts, ideally with zero duplication, minimal coordination, and leveraging our strengths, interests, and desires to the extent possible.

We often hear the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" when it comes to great success, for example, in reference to the founding fathers of the US or in award recipient speeches. We should, however, also take inspiration from another tiny but mighty creature – ants. Ant colonies are incredibly organized and efficient, all without the need for direct communication. It's time to learn from these masters of collaboration and organization.

We have to change our thinking about the Web such that it supports a shift from a personal computing paradigm that disempowers and extracts our energies to one that embraces and enhances the collective good. A paradigm where we use computers together as a network of networks, as a collective of collectives, for the greater good, following in the footsteps of ants.

What could that look like? Whatever problems you are dealing with or working on, you would be connected to other people in the world who are working on the same thing and who are able and willing to help with these types of problems, and who are available when you need them. Or who have left traces on the Web that can lead us to resolution. The hard part is finding one other and connecting, which is facilitated by on-page presence. Just go to the relevant webpage and see who's there, or who has been there recently. Or what they wrote in the canopi. Besides on-page presence, AI will also be helpful in helping us find one another.

Collaborations can start with a basic agreement on principles of coordination, with the views of the problem and solution expected to converge in the course of the coordination. Related bridgework may provide a shared contextual view of the problem and solution spaces that evolves over time. That way, when we are talking about something, and looking online in the same direction, we see the same thing.

Here are some examples:

• A team of molecular biologists is working on a delivery system for an enzyme that breaks down viral pathogens. They're having some issues with getting the enzyme to the most affected cells and tissues. One of them opens a recent study about relevant enzyme delivery to the proximate areas of the body. Through on-page presence, she reviews the visible list to find researchers who have visited the page recently. She reviews the page chat to see who may be working on relevant enzyme delivery issues.
• A parent and their teenage son are having a hard time communicating about the son's porn addiction. The parent visits a webpage about porn addiction. Their AI assistant also takes them to relevant sites for authoritative parenting, parental monitoring, educative parenting, and emotion coaching. Through on-page presence, the parent finds a network of parents, counselors, former porn addicts, and therapists that are able to support them separately and together, when they need them.
• Rural transplants have purchased their dream country home in the backroads of Tennessee but in the late Fall, they discover that the wood-fired stove is not producing enough heat. This is their first time operating a wood-fired stove. If they don't remedy the situation, it's going to be a long winter. The first thing he thinks of is on-page presence. He goes to a wood-fired stove site but no one's there, so he heads to a site about rural living where he speaks to someone in Germany's Black Forest, who suspects it could be a blocked airflow and suggests that visit his local community page. At the community page, he finds a neighbor willing to help. He knows the person is a real person in good standing because of their digital footprint. The neighbor comes by and helps him determine that, thank goodness, it is blocked flue rather than a poorly placed air intake or a lack of proper ventilation. On the way out, the neighbor also suggests that they load less wood into the stove at a time.
• A utilitarian cyclist's old bike lock is not turning with the key. She goes to the product page of the lock on the manufacturer's site thinking that they would have troubleshooting information, but the lock is too old. Using on-page presence, she reviews the comments from others on the page chat, and finds that the lock can be opened with a hairpin. After unlocking her bike, she comes back to get some recommendations for her next lock. Better safe than sorry.

Whatever and whenever we need, the collective is there, whether through content, online, or in person.

As we continue to evolve our relationship with computers, we are again seeing that its potential is far greater than we had imagined, as will be demonstrated by the analysis below. We see massive potential for value creation through on-page presence, knowledge building, and collaboration. We realize, by working together, we can tap into the full potential of the collective and its innate intelligence. We see the potential for computers to bring us together, and to make us smarter both individually and as a collective, and we can imagine the feedback loops between the two.

Hence, the future of our relationship with computers is one of collective computing, where we use computers together as a collective of collectives to address our individual needs as well as our planetary challenges.

Adopting a collective computing approach would help address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a comprehensive and unified manner. Economic interests may prioritize certain SDGs that align with their goals, but connecting researchers, practitioners, and initiatives within and between SDG goals, building a bridge-based information ecology for the SDGs, and reconfiguring SDG incentives, or providing additional incentives, could encourage stakeholders to consider SDGs equally and holistically.

The shift towards collective computing would enable new forms of collaboration, and help develop humanity's collective cognitive capabilities, which are also essential for addressing global challenges. Furthermore, it would allow for the creation of a collaborative online knowledge-based economy, where the value of information is determined by the quality, relevance, and accuracy of the data, rather than the attention it generates.

This is problematic, as the attention economy not only exacerbates our global challenges but hampers us from addressing them. On the other hand, a knowledge-building economy could be foundational in solving them.

By connecting and collaborating in ways that are impossible with Today's Web, we can tap into the full potential of the collective and create something greater than the sum of its parts. The difference in value between 4 billion isolated users on the Web compared to 4 billion collaborators is truly staggering.

Using Metcalfe's law, we can measure the difference in value mathematically. Metcalfe's law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its participants:

where V is the network value and n is the population.

The more participants connected in a network, the greater the network value. In the context of the web participants, the value increases exponentially with the connections between participants. The increase in connections between participants can lead to various benefits such as an increase in productivity, connection, communication, collaboration, sensemaking, and collective intelligence. It creates diversity in perspectives, talents, and interests that can be leveraged for deeper engagement and better decision-making.

If we think of the web as an orchestra, each individual user is a solo musician with their own talents and abilities. The orchestra can only work if the solo musicians collaborate. Imagine an orchestra of solo musicians, each playing with headphones on, only hearing their own contributions. The result would be a disjointed, chaotic, and cacophonous performance.

On the other hand, when these solo musicians are able to work together with the help of a conductor, the result is a beautiful and powerful symphony. In the same way, when 4 billion isolated web users are able to collaborate and work together with the help of a collaboration machine, the result could be a more coordinated and productive experience for all. By connecting and collaborating, we can tap into the full potential of the collective and create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Applying Metcalfe's Law to the scenario of 4 billion isolated web users, the network value is 4 billion. When, however, we apply Metcalfe's Law to the scenario of 4 billion people who are able to collaborate on webpages, the network value increases astronomically. The value of the network is equal to:

where V is the network value and n is the population.

This is 2*10⁹ times greater than the value of the network when 4 billion people are isolated. This staggering difference in value theoretically could occur if 4 billion people were able to collaborate and connect on the Web. But this obviously is not a reasonable assumption given human constraints such as time, attention, and access.

Applying Metcalfe's Law to 4 billion humans collaborating on the internet is problematic for several reasons. First, human relationships and connections are not as simple or straightforward as connections between devices in a network. Humans have limited time and capacity for close, stable relationships, which can impact the formation and maintenance of connections on the internet.

Second, the value of a connection between humans is determined by the quality and nature of those connections. In other words, not all connections are created equal and the value of a connection can vary greatly depending on the context and purpose of the connection.

Third, humans are not purely rational actors and their behavior cannot be easily predicted or modeled, which makes it difficult to accurately measure the value of connections between humans on the internet.

That said, the stigmergic nature of the Overweb creates an environment where the value of a connection is not solely determined by the people we know. The Overweb allows us to indirectly collaborate with all those who share our interest in a topic, by leaving traces in the form of smart tags, canopi chats, and visibility lists that layer knowledge on webpages. This expands the number of people that we can collaborate with well beyond the number of stable relationships or even the number we can directly communicate with. It also allows for larger group sizes and a more diverse set of perspectives. In other words, the Overweb's stigmergic nature creates a more flexible, inclusive, and diverse collaboration environment.

To make allowances for our humanness though, we conservatively assume that even with powerful stigmergic collaboration tools, people on average will choose to collaborate within small networks. We can modify Metcalfe's law to calculate the network value assuming that people collaborate in groups, as follows:

where V_s is the network value for group size s, s is the group size, and n is the population. A good starting point for group size is the Dunbar number, a concept introduced by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s. It refers to the maximum number of stable social relationships that a human can maintain at any one time. He found that the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking and social cognition, is proportional to the size of social groups in primates. He proposed that this relationship also applies to humans and that the average human can maintain stable social relationships with around 150 individuals. The Dunbar number is often used as a benchmark for the size of social groups in human societies, such as the size of a tribe or a village. It is also commonly used in the context of social networks and online communities, where it is believed that people have difficulty maintaining more than 150 stable relationships.

To calculate the network value of 4 billion people collaborating in groups of 150, the Dunbar number, the value of the network is equal to: