The emergence of the next-level web was like Alice's journey to Wonderland. Initial conversations were rather pedestrian, following common thought tunnels. But ruminations about connecting information led to a mysterious rabbit hole that went deep into the unknown. Just like the rabbit hole to Wonderland, this rabbit hole – filled with its twists and turns, synchronous surprises, and moments of realization – also ended up in an entirely new world.

At first, it was like free-falling through ideas. Then, the rabbit hole landed on the synaptic web and a map for the Internet, both of which were located in the territory of the Metaweb. As the Metaweb emerged into our awareness, it opened a new world of opportunities for transforming the Web and solving the problems that plague it, many of which are chronicled in this book. In retrospect, the Metaweb was always here, but only became apparent because the rabbit hole shifted our perspective.

The initial Metaweb spark happened in 2014. Despite exponentially more data available and everyone having access to more or less the same information, experts were arriving at opposite conclusions. Sometimes even when they had similar values. Obviously, they were focusing on different data or interpreting the data differently. Perhaps entrenched interests, blind spots, personal biases, or access issues were also in play.

Meanwhile, links on the Web were less plentiful than before. Commercial sites were avoiding external links, seeking to keep visitors on their websites. Links were the mechanism to cite sources and connect evidence to claims. With links disappearing, the context was dying and information was in silos. The Web needed a shared context, but information silos and the lack of context foreclosed on that possibility. No one, including experts, could even agree on what information was available.

Everyone including the experts has personal stashes of information in silos. They may prove useful in the future ... if one remembers them and can find what they need. But they're spread across the social web, bookmarked pages, and information copied and pasted into Google Docs, Evernote, Roam Research, or another silo on the cloud or our computer.

The Metaweb started as a concept of a long-term conversation on the Internet; unlike the news and online conversations, which were short-lived and ephemeral. Here today, gone tomorrow in a sea of past stories. No continuity other than self-interested links. Even Reddit archived its threads after six months. The web was for short-term conversations.

Humanity has needed a place where a layperson can explore any topic and get a deep sense of the relevant questions related to it. Everyone would have access to the same information. People could investigate claims, evidence, perspectives, and data sources. And if they found relevant knowledge somewhere else, it would be self-evident where to post it. Also, a notification would optionally inform every person in the thread that additional information had become available.

Such a platform could be indispensable for many complex issues that humanity was facing. But it couldn't be just another information silo; information silos were a large part of the problem.

Mark Passio is truly one-of-a-kind. He's acerbic and ardent. A metal-playing, natural law-advocating, American-Italian commentator on the state of the world who describes his presentation style as caustic, intense, and combative. He begins presentations by saying, "My catchphrase for my entire speaking career has been and continues to be 'get as offended as you like.' I'm not here to be liked or make friends." He presents the harsh truths and realities of what is happening on Earth.

Passio recorded over 200 "What on Earth is Happening!" podcasts. The 6+ hour podcasts address the state of the world through a natural law lens and expose the dark occultists ("the controllers") that control the masses (whom they call "the Dead") through ancient knowledge of the human psyche. Passio dedicated a handful of episodes to the Trivium, a primal method for discerning the truth, which he considered foundational for understanding natural law and the podcast.1 While perception is not reality, it can be in harmony with reality. We all have filters that veil us from the comprehensive and accurate perception of reality. The Trivium removes filters, uncovering truth and reality, so we can act.

As in the quote, the Trivium suggests that to effect real change, one must focus beyond the symptoms to the causal factors or the source of the problems. This requires understanding the problem and how it started – that is, "the Why," which uncovers available options. The story of how something came to be often illuminates its Why. (In the next chapter, we explore how the Web came to be.) Without the Why, we cannot reliably effect change.

Figure 10.1 The Trivium: a pathway to truth.

As shown in Figure 10.1, we depict the Trivium as a three-layer pyramid. Knowledge is the base. Understanding in the middle layer. Wisdom is at the top. The Trivium simply tells us, to make wise decisions, we need a correct understanding. To have a correct understanding, we need a clean and accurate knowledge base.

Pre-dating Egypt, the Trivium comes from ancient mystery school traditions. Humans have known and used this technology to discover the truth for eons. We don't know the age of the Trivium. It's from antiquity.

The etymology of the Trivium is two Latin words – Tres or Tria meaning three and Via meaning way, path, or road. A way is also a method. Putting the words together, we get three roads, three ways, or three methods. Hence, the Trivium is the threefold path to truth. The Trivium helps us to get to the true underlying causes of our conditions so we can change them.

The takeaway from the Trivium is profound. Knowledge is the foundation of our intellectual capabilities and the discernment of truth. With a bad knowledge base, there is little chance of understanding and, therefore, making consistently wise choices.

For a hyper-computational civilization, we perhaps have the worst knowledge base conceivable, which diminishes our capacity for collective sensemaking, meaning-making, and choice-making. It's not that it is all bad information, but that, without context, the good and bad information are indistinguishably mixed on Today's Web of silos.

Humanity needs the Web to be its knowledge base because it serves as a vast and constantly evolving repository of information, accessible to people worldwide. In today's fastpaced and globalized world, the ability to easily access and share information is essential for personal and collective growth, innovation, and progress.

The Web offers a level of flexibility, scalability, and accessibility that no other platform can match. Other knowledge management systems, such as libraries or physical archives, are limited by location, accessibility, and outdated information. Similarly, other digital platforms, such as databases or intranet systems, are restricted to specific groups or organizations and lack the reach and connectivity of the web.

Humanity needs its knowledge base to provide a shared context for communication, coordination, and collaboration, so we can think, learn, and build knowledge together. This would enable us to build our collective intelligence and other collective cognitive capabilities. The Web is the only system that offers the possibility of a shared contextual view of the world's knowledge, but it's far from that now. Today's Web is deeply fragmented with information isolated in silos.

This reality begs the question: how might we reorganize content on the Web to elicit effective responses from humanity at all levels, from experts to policymakers to the public? The Trivium (and observations of social media) show that effective conversation platforms cannot operate on a rotten knowledge base. It follows that we need to focus on creating our best knowledge base before developing conversational platforms.

First things first. Effective sensemaking and collaboration platforms that operate at scale will come after reorganizing the world's information and building upon the new knowledge base. Google claims to have already organized the world's information, but the organization of information is still a work in progress, and their approach is optimized more for them to extract large amounts of money through advertising. This has created incentives for companies to create low-quality and duplicate SEO content, which makes the Web worse overall. The information presented by Google is not always of high quality, and there can be inconsistencies in search results. It is clear that the way Google organizes information is more beneficial for them in terms of revenue rather than for the benefit of humanity's knowledge base.

In the next section, we explore how the human brain organizes information and how it relates to reorganizing the Web.

Neurologists now believe the density and flexibility of connections between neurons in the human brain, rather than neurons themselves, are at the root of intelligence. These chemical bonds between neurons are called "synapses."

The total number of brain cells, or neurons, peaks in early adulthood. Our ability, however, to generate new connections among neurons and between different parts of the brain persists throughout our lives. Neurologists call this "neuroplasticity" or "plasticity." Like other muscles, the brain's plasticity increases with exercise.3

The synapse is the chemical bridge in the "gap" between one neuron and another. These neural bridges create pathways that grow and contract. When used, they strengthen with additional connections. When unused, they dissolve, making way for new, more useful pathways. These incredible chemical bridges define the neural communication patterns that define our cognitive capacity.

Relative to learning in the human brain, the Web seems, if not primitive, certainly an ineffective teacher with its own learning disability. While the Web has almost 2 trillion pages, the amount of contextually relevant links is low, surely less than a handful per page. The web grows in connections when new pages link to previously existing pages.

In contrast, the human brain is a cornucopia of connections. Each human brain has about 86 billion neurons.4 Each neuron may have up to 10,000 connections or synapses, and the human brain up to 1 quadrillion connections5> – many more connections than the entire Internet. And the human brain can continue learning throughout its entire life.

Could we organize the Internet like synapses in the brain?

Neural science provides an apt metaphor for the "synaptic web" in that the connections between objects are more important than the objects themselves. Just as neurons in the brain connect and communicate to form complex networks that allow for thought and consciousness, the interconnectedness of information on the web is crucial for understanding and making sense of it.

Similarly, indigenous or original peoples have traditionally placed great importance on relationships, both between individuals and between individuals and the natural world. This concept of relational thinking can be applied to the web, where the connections between pieces of information and ideas are vital for understanding and utilizing them effectively. The synaptic web emphasizes the importance of understanding the relationships between pieces of information and ideas, rather than just the information and ideas themselves. Thus, the synaptic web is not just about organizing information, but also about understanding and utilizing the relationships between that information to create a more holistic and meaningful understanding of the world.

The work on the synaptic web is focused on creating a more interconnected and holistic way of organizing and understanding information on the web. The idea is to move away from traditional hierarchical structures, such as search engine results, and instead focus on the connections and relationships between pieces of information. Key players in this field include companies like Google, with their knowledge graph, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, who have been working on ways to create a more connected web by making use of semantic web technologies, such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language).

Semir Zeki, a professor of Neurobiology at University College London, has been working on the relationship between brain science, art, neuroscience, and the web and how the synaptic web can be related to the human brain and the way humans perceive and process information. Additionally, researchers and experts in semantics, artificial intelligence, data science, and machine learning have been working on developing methods for understanding the relationships between different pieces of information. This includes the use of natural language processing, graph databases, and network analysis to create more meaningful connections between pieces of information.

The director and founder of the World-Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee – also known as the "father of the World Wide Web" – has been a prominent advocate for the development of the synaptic web. He has been working on developing a more connected and semantic web through the use of technologies such as RDF and OWL. James Hendler, Lada Adamic, Tom Mitchell, Deborah McGuinness, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Katherine Parr, and others have been working on understanding relationships between pieces of online information on the web and how they can be used to create a more connected web and holistic understanding of information.

How might the connections between information create new Web experiences? Online tools could enable us to see the connections between specific pieces of information, a shared context, and the patterns and pathways that form in the aggregate.

Some see the exploding variety, speed, and flexibility of electronic connections to be the root of developing collective intelligence. We are hyper-connected! With electronic connections between and among people, datasets, machines, the physical world, and online content we've seen, within the metaverse, with gestures, meanings, messages, and even thoughts. As we optimize for connectedness in our hyperspace world, we'll get collectively smarter along the way.

As discussed in Chapter 6, Metcalfe's law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its nodes or users. In a synaptic web of content, its contextual value increases exponentially with the connections between content on webpages. In applying Metcalfe's Law, however, to estimate the network value of context, we must account for each piece of information having limited connections. One way is to calculate the network value of a densely connected group of content within the synoptic web. The assumption is with such a group, all or most of the pieces of content are directly related.

Mathematically, Metcalfe's law can be represented as V = n2, where V is the value of the network and n is the number of pieces of content. As the number of connections between webpage content increases, the value of the network also increases exponentially. For example, if there are 100 pieces of content within a densely connected group, the contextual value of the network is 10,000 (1002). If there are 200 pieces of content within a densely connected group, the contextual value of the network is 40,000 (2002). As we can see, the contextual value of the network increases three times as fast as the pieces of content.6

The context resulting from connections between content can increase sensemaking, collective intelligence, search effectiveness, usability and navigation of the web, productivity, and user satisfaction. It makes it easier to find relevant information and make connections between different pieces of information, leading to a deeper understanding of topics and better decision-making. It also improves the overall usability of the web, making it easier for users to find what they need and navigate the information, ultimately saving time and effort and increasing productivity.

Hence, the synaptic web that connects information would provide tremendous value at the root of the next evolution of the Web.

Today's Web is an unhealthy melange of the Web 1.0 document delivery platform and Web 2.0 as a platform for social communication. The sum is a sparse and noisy network; shown on the left in Figure 10.2. The low number of connections meant low intelligence in the network. With so many less-than-useful nodes compared to high-quality information nodes, the Web had a very low signal-to-noise ratio and therefore was less useful than it could otherwise be. With Today's Web, we don't have a legend or a way to know what is high quality vs low quality vs promotional vs misinformation, before we visit the page.

The synaptic web can move us towards something much more profound: a dynamic web of adaptive "organic" and implicit connections, where real-time information flows give structure and meaning to previously unconnected sets of data. Imagine the Web as a sea of conversations streaming through connections, and patterns having meaning.

Figure 10.2 Moving from sparse and noisy to a deeply connected synaptic network.

As shown on the right in Figure 10.2, a synaptic web enables filtering for high-quality information. Wouldn't it be helpful to filter out clickbait and partisan hacks? We can categorize the nodes into types. You choose the nodes to display. Or you can see everything connected to the focus of your attention. A synaptic web provides context.

In a synaptic web mimicking the human mind, everything connects. Every piece of information, claim, and content snippet explicitly connects to everything that relates. Each connection between pieces of content is a relationship (e.g., supporting, contradicting, exemplifying, citing), or perhaps several relationships. You can imagine adding colors to the connections to distinguish the relationships and even changing the line's thickness to reflect the strength of the connection.

Bamm! The bridge was born. Bridges connecting pieces of online content emerged as a building block of online knowledge that mimics the brain's synaptic connections. A bridge connects two pieces of information with a relationship. The bridge itself is a basic expression of knowledge. But they self-assemble into an entire web or graph of bridges that could connect all the world's information.

What if bridges are everything?

Our first thought was citing bridges from news articles to studies. We thought of supporting and contradicting bridges from news to relevant studies, articles, blogs, and even tweets. We imagined a vast network of bridges to Wikipedia pages. And a vast ecology of bridges just among tweets. The possibility of connecting the world's information was novel and exciting.

It became apparent that, in a synaptic web, filtering was more important than searching. Filtering is a next-generation tool that helps navigate content discovery. While a search narrows the infinite document Web to a digestible set of pages, filtering is about narrowing the torrent of streams, nodes, and networks into something that matches your immediate criteria. It's about defining and constantly refining your worldview so that information can find you.

Filtering is not just a synaptic web opportunity, it is a synaptic process. Smart filters can help match the content and conversations with your current interests, future intents, and tolerances. The filtering makes a synaptic web much easier to use, less overwhelming, and more focused.

In 2016, members of Bridgit DAO developed a first-of-its-kind animated (i.e., augmented reality) children's book, Pacha's Pajamas: A Story Written By Nature (Figure 10.3).7 The AR book had an app called Pacha Alive. Hovering Pacha Alive over one of 80 line drawings brought the characters to life. 3D characters appeared to leap off the page!

After New York publisher Morgan James published the AR book, we spent several months thinking about the future of books and augmented reality books. The thesis was, in the future, the book becomes a guided and curated pathway through the relevant universe of multimedia, interactions, and experiences. Like Vannevar Bush's associative trials! A universe of possibilities emerges as overlays displaying videos, information, interactions, and virtual reality experiences associated with text snippets and images in the book.

Access to the overlay would be through a mobile phone, virtual and augmented reality interfaces. We developed concepts around personalization, creation of content, and dealing with multiple triggers in the field. But we were most excited about the social AR book concept. It included connecting book knowledge on an idea-by-idea basis, as well as book clubs meeting on book pages and asynchronous conversations in the digital marginalia.

In early 2017, when the Pacha project got some funding, we filed five provisional patents. The last patent we worked on was the social augmented reality book. When we spoke about making connections between pieces of content in different books, we realized passages and images in books could also connect to relevant info on the Web. We wanted to add the Web to the patent.

But connecting to the Web required another patent. In the following days, we were excited. Not only about connecting book-to-web but also web-to-book, and even more so about connecting web-to-web. To accommodate the latter case, a provisional patent was created that became the Bridge patent. In June 2017, building upon the notion of a synaptic web of bridges, we provisionally filed the Bridge patent: A system for retrieving and creating contextual links between objects of the user interface.8

Figure 10.3 Pacha of Pacha's Pajamas.

We now see this as a defensive patent that reduces the likelihood that a Google or Facebook could prevent us from using our invention. Our intention is to move Bridgit patents into the public realm, but in a way that prevents tech giants from monopolizing or harming the movement. (In 2021, Holochain announced it was using its patent in this way.9 An enthusiastic response from the market shot the token value up, tripling its value in a couple of months.)

We were easing into a deep well of possibility.

"Knowledge is power" is an aphorism most commonly attributed to 16th-century philosopher Francis Bacon, but earlier forms date as far back as the 10th century in the Islamic script Nahj al-Balagha.10 Knowledge is the primary step of the learning process and enables the possibility of understanding and wisdom. Without knowledge and the required access to information, we cannot understand "the Why," and therefore cannot act wisely. From time immemorial, humanity has always leveraged imbalances of knowledge for advantage – from weapons of war to the trading floor to sales conversations.

Information is only as useful as the connections between it. The relevant connections are context which make information actionable. Without context, information is not actionable. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine long ago, two rival factions in neighboring kingdoms aim to accumulate knowledge and power. The first faction understands the notions of knowledge (i.e., knowledge opens doors to the future) and power (i.e., power breaks barriers) separately. Hold these two ideas in your mind, but separately. Do not allow knowledge and power to connect. The second faction understands the separate concepts, as well as how they connect.

• Knowledge creates opportunities for power
• Applied knowledge leads to power
• Power leads to more accessible knowledge and power

Understanding the relationship between knowledge and power gives the second faction a lethal advantage over the first faction. It helps the second faction better understand "the Why" of the dynamics of circumstances involving knowledge and power. This understanding helps them reliably choose the wisest actions.

It's similar for two, ten, or ten thousand things. And exponentially more so as network complexity increases. Simply put, those who understand how nodes relate in complex networks are best prepared to navigate and make sense of the network.

In 2018, we did an ad hoc experiment to see to what extent links connect the Web. The intention was to start with a breaking news article related to an ongoing story and follow the path to up to 100 external pages, all the while tracking the number and type of external links. We randomly started with the NBC News article "Bill Cosby sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison for Andrea Constand sexual assault."11

There were zero outbound links about the Cosby story from the starting page. One internal link, however, went to a previous NBC News Cosby story that itself had zero external Cosby links and four internal Cosby links. We followed these links. Two pages had Cosby links back to the predecessor page and two were Cosby dead-ends. This NBC Cosby story-verse had only 7 pages with zero external links and 7 internal Cosby links as well as 8 ads, up to 2 recommended stories per page, and about 50 generic internal links per page.

A textbook example of an information silo, which is web typical. We've read articles on important environmental reports that don't link to the report.

We see a future where connectedness is a measure of the Web's health. Imagine web spiders traversing the Web starting with a page or a site, and tracking the different links on each page: navigation links, other internal links to pages on the site, advertising links, and non-advertising outbound links. We'd love to know the average number of (non-advertising) external links for different websites and site categories.

As Bitcoin OG Lamar Wilson notes, winning highly correlates with breakthroughs. On Today's Web, we happen upon breakthroughs but what if we could plan them?

Breakthroughs require deviating from the informational fields that keep us stuck, including confirmation bias, filter bubbles, unfounded conspiracy theories, and top-down narratives. The top recommendations of search reflect and shape the dominant and sometimes competing narratives (e.g., Wikipedia, Snopes). While there often is truth in competing dominant narratives, they also have inherent blind spots. In such cases, an integrative narrative that reconciles contradictory aspects of the competing narratives and cherry-picks from less popular narratives can be the fullest representation of the reality of the situation.

Kelly's commentary on outliers reminds us that breakthroughs are on the edge of knowledge.

Imagine this. You're learning something, but things aren't adding up. You get a piece of information that changes everything. That morsel of knowledge connects the dots and everything shifts. You see the world differently, clearly understanding how things fit together. Your world model has integrity again. You are ready to put your new understanding into action. You move forward definitively, knowing your choices have a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding.

Breakthrough knowledge is transformative and attainable. We can cultivate it with effective systems. Knowledge is immanent. Triggers for learning are all around us. The right idea, intuition, or time makes the difference. It's not usually the initial idea, but the directionality that leads to breakthroughs. Staying on the path, intuition or experiments at crossroads, and noticing cairns along the path increase the likelihood of breakthrough. Breakthrough knowledge can be the difference between success and failure, between hundreds and hundreds of millions of euros, between relapse and recovery.

Yet, we rarely seek breakthrough knowledge. Most breakthrough knowledge comes via brute force (e.g., relentless searching) and/or serendipity (e.g., scrolling feeds). When we experience breakthrough knowledge, others in the same consciousness and/or information field often have parallel breakthrough experiences. We, however, seem to have reached a "research flatline" of sorts, where we're all doing the same searches. Google, of course, encourages this via search suggestions because it supports their bottom line. Ultimately, we comb through the same shallow set of easily retrievable information. We're not able to collaborate informally on online research. Or build on one another's research.

Think about it. Something happens; breaking news involving Elon Musk or Trump or Will Smith slapping someone. In the next 5 hours, let's say ten million people at least skim the article. Of these, one-tenth or one million find a specific claim to be intriguing or contentious. Of these, one-tenth or 100 thousand do variations of seven searches about the claim. That's why Google can predict what you want to search for. Of these, one-tenth or 10 thousand find something they consider noteworthy. Of these, one-tenth or one thousand decide to save it into one of their personal data silos or to share it on social media (Figure 10.4).

Most people on social media engage without reading. Even if they read it, the information they share is separate from the claim that started it all. They post links to the page but not directly to the claim. Meanwhile, everyone who goes to the article sees exactly the same thing – just the article, despite thousands of people having found relevant information.

Figure 10.4 Hypothetical engagement funnel for a popular article.

With a synaptic web, people can see the research of their predecessors. Of the 1,000 content snippets people saved or shared, let's say 10% are unique, relevant, and interesting. That's fodder for 100 bridges. People with "synaptic web" access will see the bridges attached to the contentious claim. If they like, they can search for new information and build bridges upon what's already there.

As McKinney highlights, the path to becoming a world-class innovator lies in the commitment to relentless and thorough exploration, unveiling innovations that remain undiscovered by those who shy away from this arduous task.

Author Michael Simmons suggests three ideas for increasing the likelihood of an infoutopia with breakthrough knowledge rather than an info-apocalypse:13

• Ask yourself simple questions that help filter breakthrough knowledge from incremental knowledge.
• Use knowledge formats that have a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
• Learn a skill that will help you systematically improve your ability to find breakthrough knowledge.

A synaptic web creates the possibility of a new knowledge format with a significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio as well as providing a platform for improving your ability to find breakthrough knowledge.

A February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Web Logs and Inequality"14 explored the prevalence of inbound links in blogs. He found that relatively few blog posts have many inbound links. He described "The long tail" as the many millions of blog posts with few inbound links. Because Google uses inbound links as a key metric in search ranking, the long tail is not in search indices.

Figure 10.5 Most of Amazon's book sales come from "the long tail".

Chris Anderson of TED built on Shirky's long tail. He suggested long tail opportunities are important in the aggregate. Anderson explored the collective market share of products in low demand or with low sales. He found they could collectively rival or exceed a few current bestsellers if the distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites research showing that 57% of Amazon's sales came from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores as shown in Figure 10.5.15

Applying the long tail to knowledge suggests the importance of integrating accurate long tail information to develop a full understanding. This is consistent with the Trivium, the ancient tradition of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in classical education. As explained by Plato's dialogues, considering relevant and accurate information is a prerequisite for consistently achieving an accurate understanding.

The long tail extends to search. Most searchers only see the top results. The long tail suggests highly relevant information likely exists beyond the first page for many informational queries. (But if Google is a Potemkin village as discussed in Chapter 5, a Shirkyian long tail for search may not even exist.)

The long tail concept also extends to advertising. Many advertising opportunities involve pockets of information that are unrelated to page metadata, yet could be highly effective for targeting customers by interest.

Consider, for example, an engaging paragraph within a post on a relatively unknown travel blog. The post is about a trip to France and has a delightful passage about a coffee experience in a café outside the Louvre museum in Paris. The metadata for the site is about travel and it has few incoming links. Hence, search would not recommend the page for the search term "French coffee." Display advertising doesn't know about the reader's potential interest in French coffee because coffee is not in the metadata. But a context engine (working through the synaptic web) that accesses the long tail of content metadata could effortlessly present ads directly related to any content on the page. If the reader's attention went to the passage about the café, the context engine would present content and ads about French coffee. This would provide more accurate targeting, more impressions per page, and per browsing session in long-tail search and advertising.

In the next section, we explore how the synaptic web is like a map for breakthrough knowledge.

Albeit underappreciated, maps are transformative. With maps, we find our way, choose our next adventure, and discover new things. Maps help us find a location, how to get there, and what's nearby.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine having to cross a country and or even an unfamiliar town without a map app. When was the last time you used a paper map or a Thomas guide? Imagine using paper maps to cross a continent. Now imagine a world without maps.

Hundreds of years ago, the average person rarely traveled.

Journeying was a common subject in ancient literature (e.g., Homer's epic poem The Odyssey). Most travel was for warfare, diplomacy, general state building, or trade. Social motivations for travel included religious pilgrimages, festivals such as the Olympics, and health-related reasons. But the average person usually stayed close to home.

Around 600 B.C., ancient Babylonians scratched the earliest known map of the world onto a clay tablet. The star-shaped map is only five-by-three inches. It shows the world as a flat disc surrounded by an ocean, or "bitter river." Babylon and the Euphrates River are a pair of rectangles in the center. The neighboring cities of Assyria and Susa are small, circular blobs.

Outside of the disc sit several triangular wedges, depicting far-off islands with whimsical names like "beyond the flight of birds" and "a place where the sun cannot be seen." The accompanying cuneiform text describes these unknown lands as being populated by mythological beasts. The map shows both real geographical features and elements of Babylonian cosmology.

Maps help us see the high-level and ground-level views, and to switch between them. They help us know a location, how to get there, and what's nearby. Without our map app, we feel uneasy even when familiar with the area. Part of us wants confirmation we are heading the optimal way. Maps can be invaluable.

Maps are one of the most underestimated tools that we have; this may be especially potent for those of you who are horrible with directions. While mapping apps have liberated directionally challenged people, the jump from physical to virtual maps is less drastic than from "no map" to map.

There's no map of the internet. That's one reason why there's little context (and trust) in web content.

Imagine towns being ideas and roads describing the relationship between the concepts. Instead of a fixed geography based on precise measurements, ideas and connections on a "knowledge graph" are dynamic. They can adjust their position based on the active view. Connections remain intact regardless of the positioning of ideas, which may adjust for convenience, aesthetics, and/or sensemaking.

Knowledge graphs are also much more scalable than search engines. When you have a knowledge graph, it is computationally simple to create, build, and retrieve context for the active node or, in this case, idea, since that is a simple query of its direct connections.

Contrast this with search engines. Google has enormous server farms to index one small sliver of the Internet day after day and serve lightning-fast queries of the giant databases holding the index. And yet even this sliver of the Internet (i.e., Google's dominion) is growing exponentially, while the length of a day is steadfast, which could ultimately prove a limiting factor for an index-based search.

What happens when Google can't index fast enough? Google's index broke at least five times in 2019. And in early August 2022, when there were "tons of complaints about indexing issues, pages dropping out of the index, and super poor quality and dated search results being shown," which Google said was due to an electrical incident in their Council Bluffs, Iowa data center. (Perhaps a good reason for decentralization.) Recall the earlier discussion about Google being a Potemkin village. Could the limits to index-based search be the reason Google's search results are orders of magnitude smaller than purported?

In sum, a knowledge graph based on bridges may be the Holy Grail. But Web 2.0 advocates say it'll take too much time and effort to make a graph of the Web. We don't think it has to.

Furthermore, we think that people actually want to solve crimes and injustices, uncover the truth, and build knowledge around their purpose and passions. The enthusiasm of creators jumping into citizen researcher, reporter, and sleuth mode on YouTube to solve mysterious tragedies is palpable. While rampant speculation and hasty conclusions may be present, the fervor and passion for connecting the dots suggest an appetite for better information. We think many of the YouTubers and Tweeps investigating unsolved murders would be excited to collaborate on a digital crime board containing everyone's finds.

When people can earn value for building knowledge on topics they already research, we think maps will take off in subareas. With proper incentives, many would take part. This brings more value to the ecosystem, enabling it to grow.

And once one subarea happens, seven more are on the way because everything connects. Subject creep. What subareas will people build out first? Perhaps, the ideas whose time has come. And topics relating to major controversies, pressing issues, or confounding crimes and mysteries.

Given humanity's existential threats, we need to develop the capacity to build and scale collective intelligence. If we are collectively intelligent, we can alter our course towards balancing the biosphere and thriving in a just and life-affirming world. Had we the necessary tools, might we reorganize our lives to be less taxing on the planet and provide the essentials for all? Were we collectively intelligent, we'd build a world focused less on money and more on heart.

Transitioning to the New Earth will require a map of the online information ecology. Perhaps regenerative practitioners, communities, and even a "regen" or ReFi meta-community will build a map for regeneration and the New Earth. Such a map could surely grow into a collective map for matters vital to humanity's future.

Today's Web is not great for research. Since commercial sites avoid non-commercial outbound links, researchers have to rely upon search rather than the surf-and-search approach that prevailed before advertising became the dominant monetization strategy and outbound links became less plentiful on the web. Yet the #1 search engine Google indexes only a small fraction of the surface web, which limits researchers in what is ultimately findable with search.

When researchers find related content, they don't have tools for connecting it to what they have already collected. The annotation tool Diigo enables one to create lists of content snippets, but that is much less granular and informational than one-to-one connections between pieces of information with relationships. Existing tools isolate found information in silos in the cloud or on users' machines, leading to repeated tasks, missed opportunities, and diminished productivity. Silos inhibit collaboration as well as learning from and building upon one another's work.

A synaptic web turns researchers into innovators by making the entire web into a collaborative research experience. As an advanced bookmarking space, a synaptic web speeds up research by enabling collaborative mapping, helping filter false information, and revealing context on any idea. The value proposition is collaboration without coordination, faster time to insight and innovation, accelerated learning, and collective memory and intelligence.

This activity generates bridges, which self-assemble into a knowledge map that provides 360° context for any idea – starting online, and in the future, in virtual worlds and as a digital overlay in the physical world. We can use AI to analyze this context to provide additional insight, for example, with anonymized data overlays for intent and sentiment.

The Trivium tells us, to make wise decisions, we need a correct understanding and knowledge base. Our collective knowledge base – the Internet – sucks. It's low signal-to-noise and mostly walled gardens with few external links. The opposite of what we need for collective intelligence.

With a universal content graph, we can make the entire web into a collaborative research platform and a social knowledge network. The premise is: if we drastically improve our knowledge base, it could evoke a new collective response that is life-affirming, and that shifts our collective relationship with the biosphere, each other, and ourselves.

Ecosystem participants build online knowledge maps of ideas and the relationships between them, thus providing a shared context for collaboration and communication across mindsets and geographies. The knowledge maps aggregate – connecting where they share the same node – into a universal knowledge graph that provides a 360° context for ideas.

The key innovation is the bridge. Bridges enable participants to connect the Internet's walled gardens and information silos into a broader knowledge graph that provides access to deep layers of context for every idea on the web, and later for other realities. It also provides a basis for interacting with others in new ways, like connecting with friends and other participants who are on the same webpage and/or having asynchronous conversations, or responding to polls related to specific content snippets wherever you are on the web.

Bridges foster a transition towards evidence-based and values-aware discussions, as well as decentralized collaboration. Thus, a synaptic web catalyzes a shift from an Attention Economy – which exploits user data, captures attention, and manipulates behavior – towards a context (or knowledge) economy that enables more nuanced sense-making, enables more fruitful interactions, and aims to support attention.

A synaptic web connects the world's information into a universal knowledge map, creating a shared context for collaboration and communication, and an aggregation method for collective intelligence.

Wherever we are online, we can have access to deep layers of context for any idea, thus providing a shared context for collaboration towards a life-affirming, democratic future. Learning together will speed up. We will largely neutralize false information. We can work together to build knowledge around vital matters.

Imagine hundreds of millions of people all across the world, speaking dozens of languages, earning a living wage, or significantly supplementing their income doing what they would already do. In this future, democracy is strong and growing. We are more informed and active on a local level, and people are finding unexpected collaborators and team members; building social enterprises, organizations, and collaborations; and even falling in love – above the webpage.

In mid-2020, after the George Floyd riots, we created the Black Browser project to create a safe digital space for black people over the Web under the moniker #BlackIdeasMatter. We got enthusiastic responses from over 100 people who attended four virtual salons. In the Fall, we joined with app development firm 4th Ave to build the Presence browser overlay. The aim was to build a full-featured and safe instantiation of the Metaweb as a browser overlay. It would be accessible as a browser extension, and later as an open-source browser. The our firms came together and formed Presence Labs.

On Jan 21 – 22, 2021, over 100 people from 13 countries gathered at the Overweb Challenge, a virtual event focused on envisioning a web that works for humans. The challenge presented the concept of the Overweb as a trust layer over the Web that creates a healthy relationship and fair value exchange between society and the Internet.

The challenge included four panels of experts exploring the state of various aspects of the Web, including combating false claims and sensemaking; two forward-thinking panels about designing the Web and digital communities; a 20-hour working period; and a closing session with 7 "elevator pitches." The highlight of the latter was Excellerent's proposed smart tag integration that would activate the audio chat platform Clubhouse on any webpage.

The event had 190 registrants and featured 35 speakers. Sponsors were the Forbes Funds and the Web4 Foundation. Bridgit and Noetic Nomads hosted. Partners included the EU's Next Generation Internet program, Edgeryders, UMI, Excellerent Solutions, WeTech Belgium, and Skōōl.

The event surfaced many issues about the state of the Web that have already borne fruit.

On April 30, 2021, California Software Professional Association (CSPA) hosted a virtual meetup called "The Future of the Web – Reinstalling the Big Missing Feature of the Web" with over 100 registrants.17 Niki Gastinel of CSPA introduced the event. Bridgit founder Daveed Benjamin presented the unknown history of web annotation, the case for the Overweb, and the Overweb pattern. RSA fellow Joshua Armah spoke about open-source blockchain-based tools. Dan Whaley, CEO of the pioneering web annotation app Hypothesis, spoke about the history of web annotation.

The unique aspect of this event was the jury of 13 experts. The jury included Dan Whaley, Mei Ling Fung (co-founder with Vint Cerf of the People-Centered Internet), and Dan Mapes (CEO of Verses.io), among others. After the presentation, each jury member gave several minutes of commentary, including critique, use cases, and unanswered questions. The feedback was quite positive, ranging from Whaley's cautious optimism to Mapes' enthusiastic support.18

With each step down the rabbit hole, the conceptual cairns guiding our journey have increased in focus. Now, as we approach the threshold of the Metaweb, the most crucial cairn of all comes into view: the bridge. This bridge unlocks the true potential of the Metaweb, allowing us to traverse the vast expanse of interconnected information with ease. As we step onto the bridge, we leave behind the familiar terrain of the hyperlink and set out on a journey to explore the foundational principles of the Metaweb. The path ahead is uncharted and the possibilities are endless. Shall we cross the bridge and discover the true power of the Metaweb together? Let's go!

1. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/trivium-video

2. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/musk-quote-video

3. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/neural-science

4. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/humans-grow-brain-cells

5. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/huamn-brain-connections

6. When the pieces of content grow from 100 to 200 or 100% ([200 – 100]/100), the value of the network grows from 10,000 to 40,000 or 300% ([40,000 – 10,000]/10,000).

7. For more info or to see Pacha dancing in AR, please visit pachaverse.io.

8. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/bridge-patent

9. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/holochain-patent

10. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/nahjul-balagha

11. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/bill-cosby-assault

12. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/phil-mckinney-quote

13. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/accelerated-intelligence

14. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/shirky-power-laws

15. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/long-tail

16. Check out thebrain.com and roamresearch.com.

17. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/meetup-future-web

18. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/future-web-video