Towards the Agora

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Agora. It seems crazy — is it a trivial idea? I have a lot of those, and I write about them all, just in case. I write about my ideas as if they were fiction, because they likely are fiction; they don’t work, or they are trivial to the point in which they are not really ideas at all; just thoughts about the world as it is, in some way, or after some trivial transformation. Shallow.

But about the Agora: what if it were true? What if we could build an Agora, right here, right now, on the internet? It seems doable enough: a website where we can all agree to discuss earnestly, not to bicker or put the other party down but to understand the other, learn from each other, perhaps sometimes indeed convince another? The rest of the internet could remain as is; bitter, divided, misguided, petty. But the Agora would try harder.

Is it trivial because it already exists? We have many sites that could work as an Agora: hackernews, reddit, stackoverflow, twitter. Even Facebook. But those sites aren’t the Agora; the Agora is a social platform with extra rules that none of them have. The Agora is any social media, with an intention.

Or perhaps the issue is that those already exists, but I don’t know about them because nobody uses it. Or because I’m an ignoramus.

But, really, even if that is the case, I want to write about it because I want to know where it is. If it is out there then please — you, reader, if you ever exist — point me to it. Because I want to get in there.